Adage has a post that starts with a story about how Apple supposedly isn’t spending enough money on buying online ads. That’s not the right conversation to have though. Is the internet even an truly effective advertising medium?
Here’s the issue: The internet is too often viewed as inventory, as a place where brands pay for the privilege of being adjacent to content, like prime-time TV and glossy magazines relics of the pre-blog days when getting into the media game actually required infrastructure and distribution… For the media seller, ads and ad revenue might be all that’s left.
[W]hy pay for reach with the array of distribution channels already available? That’s a question no media player wants to hear, whether it’s old-school or new. Even discussions of still-shiny new phenomena such as social networks, which allow marketers to get up-close-and-personal with consumers, inevitably drift toward relatively hoary notions of advertising simply because the business model that undergirds social media is — you guessed it — advertising.
And most importantly:
“It’s easy for clients and agencies to think about banners and email because buying banners is like buying outdoor and email is like direct,”
You cannot treat the internet like the media of the old days. It might look the same, but it’s not the same duck. Jakob Neilson put it this way:
“The basic point about the web is that it is not an advertising medium. The web is not a selling medium; it is a buying medium. It is user-controlled, so the user controls, the user experiences.“
If your advertising doesn’t add value to a user’s online experience, you will fail and fall far short of your goals.
Further reading, see my post about Banner Blindness and why (traditional) banner advertising is on the way out.
