Is the web the appropriate place for your ads?

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.

Doubleclick gets the Google treatment, meet Ad Manager

Now that Google and Doubleclick have finally tied the knot, they’ve unwrapped what looks like a very compelling new product called Google Ad Manager, Wired’s Compiler has a short article on the service:

While Google AdSense offers fully automated ads based on your page’s content, the new Google Ad Manager is designed to help you manage and sell custom ads to companies of your choice.

Think of Ad Manager as a dashboard for controlling your own ad empire.

It looks as is Google has taken Doubleclick’s existing Revenue Center and given it the Google treatment.  They’ve taken explicit steps to make the tool easier to use for small companies with even smaller media departments.  Let me just say right now that I think a tool like this is going to be insanely great for small to medium sized advertising agencies.  From the official Google Blog:

Google Ad Manager is a free, hosted ad and inventory management tool that can help publishers sell, schedule, deliver and measure their directly-sold and network-based ad inventory. It offers an intuitive and simple user experience with Google speed and a tagging process so publishers can spend more time working with their advertisers and less time on their ad management solution. And by providing detailed inventory forecasts and tracking at a very granular level, Ad Manager helps publishers maximize their inventory sell-through rates.

Right now, you can sign up to receive an invitation when the service goes completely live; I can’t wait to see if it works for our team here at Stone Ward.

ad:tech Chicago this August

Looks like they’ve got a date, August 5-6. Registration starts in May. Save the date!

Demystifying “Above the fold” online

I just ran across this post on the Fluidesign Blog which tackles the ever-contensious idea of a “fold” in online marketing. The author cites several common marketing misconceptions when it comes to the idea of an online fold. It’s well worth a good read for anyone who touches the space of marketing online:

The pleasure of recognition and the promise of meaning. | Fluidesign Blog blog archive | Demystifying “Above the Fold”

Myth: Try to get all the content “above the fold”:Why it’s not true: In the beginning days of the web, we thought we had to fit all the content on 1 page, all above the fold. The problem was everything got squished, ugly, and very hard to read. So instead of trying to get all content on 1 web page, people were smart enough to create multiple web pages, i.e. a website! During this time, we also learned that is was pretty damn annoying to have to load a new page to get to new content, so pages got longer, people began to really love scroll bars, and then AJAX was invented. Thus websites now look and work a lot better than they did in the 90’s!