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Will the Internet Become a Significant Advertising Medium?

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from: Robin Hafitz
to: Rishad Tobaccowala

What's Good About the Web?

Posted Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2003, at 5:55 PM ET

Who are these people?

OK, I'll bite.

But I do so reluctantly. I don't really see it as the responsibility of us on "the buy side" to fix this problem. My job is to provide my clients with advertising, marketing, and media work that help them sell more stuff. My not-very-hidden agenda while doing that is to try in some small way to lower the overall toxicity of advertising. More crap equals a harder job for us in the business of selling things, just as more volume in a bar makes it harder for anyone to be heard. If people hated less advertising, they'd be more open to marketing messages. I tend to gravitate toward media that allow us to craft ads that people will actually like (likability correlates highly with effectiveness), and online media hasn't been very good at creating those opportunities, focused instead on ever sneakier ways to annoy people. Rich media obviously are good at that, but in spite of your enthusiasm for them, not enough people have the capability to use them to make it a smart buy for most clients.

How do we fix the problem? Or, rather, how do the people whose jobs depend on it fix it? I'm going to quote an e-mail from a smart friend, Nigel Carr (GM of k/b/p San Francisco), whom you know: "I think there's a bigger issue, and Rishad has to stop whining and face up to it: effectiveness. Online advertising was pushed initially as a profitable direct response medium and it just didn't pay out. Then they got Rex Briggs, et al., to cook up some research that said it was the greatest branding medium of all time, but—hello!—it doesn't work as well as offline to build emotional relationships quickly. Meanwhile, despite all the hype and overclaims, there has been very little PROFITABLE (to clients) innovation on the advertising front outside of a few incredibly sticky sites. Where are the thought leaders and innovators? What are Rishad and the rest of them doing? Because if they're just sitting around a table standardizing sizes, that isn't enough."

The reason, as you say, that clients and agents have reduced resources and talent against Web marketing is that it HASN'T WORKED VERY WELL. Many were burned, few were rewarded. The first thing that people on the sell side have to do is eat a little humble pie and move on.

And the first thing they need to move on to is figuring out what their medium (media, actually, since the Internet probably won't conform to a one-size-fits-all advertising model) is best at, rather than claiming that it's better than everything else at everything. In my own experience, for clients that depend on a degree of mass appeal, it's been best at adding very targeted bells and whistles to an integrated media plan, promoting things like sales in environments where people are very predisposed to care, and giving more information and community via Web sites to people who are drawn by offline advertising to want those things. What these examples have in common is that they use the Internet in combination with other media, usually as a supporting player. The opportunities to be a great supporting player are bound to increase as media converge. I'd like online sellers to make clear what they can bring to the party, rather than demanding that the party be all about them. This would make it easier to sell Internet advertising to my clients, which is, I'm pretty sure, the responsibility of the people on the sell side.

If you're on the case, Rishad, I'm confident that the evolution of the Internet as an advertising medium will move along quickly and in the right direction. And though I'm skeptical of your boosterism, I admire your passion. Thanks for the discussion.

dialogues
entries
123456
from: Robin Hafitz
to: Rishad Tobaccowala

What's Good About the Web?

Posted Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2003, at 5:55 PM ET
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Rishad Tobaccowala is president of SMG IP, an operating unit of Starcom MediaVest Group, which is one of the nation's largest communication companies. He has been selected by Time magazine as a leading marketing innovator and been elected to the Ad Age Interactive Hall of Fame. Robin D. Hafitz is co-chair of Mad Dogs & Englishmen, an award-winning advertising agency with offices in New York and San Francisco. She co-chairs the American Association of Advertising Agencies' committee on account planning, and serves on the board of the Account Planning Group US.
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Remarks From The Fray:

The problem with Internet advertising, and what will continue to drive ad money away, is that the Internet makes it too easy to check your results. Most advertising is ignored by most people most of the time. Technology lets us quantify this to a depressing degree, so you can see that, say 99.5% of the people who see your ad completely ignore that.

Print mags should be grateful that advertisers can't check up on them like that.

-- boog

(To reply, click here.)

Idealistic hopes for the potential of the Internet as a "pull" medium will probably have to stay on the back burner for a while. Virtually all of the new Internet ad technologies I've seen have been devoted to coming up with new and more intrusive ways to get unwanted messages to people who don't want to hear them.

ONE: Kazaa now "features" obnoxious audio ads that will cut into the middle of your (admittedly pirated) music selection and shout "Hey! Click over here!" at a decibel level 50% higher than the average jet.

TWO(A): The authors of crap SPAM e-mails have honed their understanding of psychology to a razor's edge, and are actually getting quite good at disguising their crud as messages you might want to have a look at. My personal favorite (the first SPAM to take me in since college) was perfectly disguised as a "message undeliverable" error notification from a mail server.

TWO(B): Perhaps even more alarming, mainstream companies like (inter alia) Crest and J.C. Penney have gotten into the game, sending SPAM out under their corporate trademarks. Given the resources available to corporate America, this toe in the water could quickly turn into the internet equivalent of Leviathan sunning himself in your 3 year old's backyard wading pool.

THREE: That impossibly annoying Qwest T-Rex ad spawned a whole phylum of progeny. Proliferating beyond reason, they all have this in common: they're designed to force you to actually pay attention to them in order to figure out where you need to click to make them go away.

Sure. . . psychoexgirlfriend.com, Napster, All Your Base Are Belong To Us, Odd Todd, Libby Hoeler, and the Theban Mapping project are examples (of varying legitimacy, desirability, and effect) of the power of "pull" advertising to create "viral memes" that can suffuse the whole of culture damn near instantaneously. Any actual products attached to these sites would have been overnight sell-outs (yes, the play on words is intentional). . . unless, of course, the lack of crass commercialism is what made these sites so popular to begin with. (Well. . . okay . . . Napster and Libby Hoeler need no explanation; for the rest, then).

Long-Awaited Conclusion

What seems to be coming down the pike is an interesting mix. People's resourcefulness in detecting, avoiding, and retaliating for (see, e.g. my riff on the CloudMark idea for a humble proposition) crap Webvertising is on the rise; but people's vulnerabiliy to clever, noncommercial memes is at an all-time high.

Maybe we're going to see an age of advertisers evocative of the famous french "precious" movement, which held it unimaginably vulgar to say "chair" when you could say "place of half-repose", or tell someone that "It is night" when you could instead regale them with the intelligence that "the curtain of the sun's long dreaming has been drawn across the firmament of aster."

Who the hell knows? Speaking of transiently invincible memes, where's Suck.com when we need them? No doubt THEY could explain the whole schmeary mess to us in a heartbeat.

I dunno. Y'All THINK I'm selling half-arsed Internet commentary here. . . but I'm really selling shotguns! Star Poster hunting season starts in 5. . . . herbal viagra. . . . 4. . . . . Teens + Farm Animals = :-). . . . . 3 . . . . Let US Refinance your house!. . . .. 2. . . . Shotguns are available on e-Bay . . . . .1. . . . . I'm tied to a chair on the outskirts of Memphis. . . .

0.

-- Thrasymachus

(To reply, click here.)

Internet advertising didn't fail! In fact, it succeeded beyond anyone's wildest imagination. It singlehandedly proved that advertsing itself doesn't work anywhere near as well as anyone in the industry would have you believe.

-- Truthteller

(To reply, click here.)

But fundamentally, it's boring to listen to advertisers talk about the internet. To them, it's all a question of eyeballs... where will they pool, and what can we do to them when they get there? I suspect that the guess that, from an advertising perspective, the internet isn't particularly different from any other medium is likely true. Which is why it's tragic to participate in the internet from an advertising perspective.

They could at least be discussing INTERESTING episodes in the history of Internet advertisement (like the "game" that came out in advance of the movie A.I. which turned into one of the most oddball and stunning testaments to the crazy potential for new behaviors that I've ever seen)... not the virtue of "pop-up" ads vs. "lie-down" ads...

-- Geoff

(To reply, click here.)

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