On Internet Advertising
I got an email from Ryan yesterday asking me if I had any thoughts on the TechCrunch internet advertising is dead post. I hadn’t read it yet (I kind of suspected it wasn’t that good when everyone was linking to it … plus, how much could I really add), but then I left it open on the plane and read it en route to Boston last night.
I wrote Ryan a long and rambling email, and then this morning I read Rick’s post over the Barbarian Group site that pretty much sums up my rambles in coherent bullet points (thanks Rick). I added three points in the comments that I thought I’d share as well:
- The most interesting stuff on the web for a brand to do will continue to be not “advertising” (using the definition of buying space to spread your message) but rather everything else a company can do on the web (example: most of our work).
- The vast majority of people don’t need to/want to make money on the web. This is a problem for 1% of the web world (if that). BG.com makes plenty of money as a promotion tool for the company, we don’t need to put ads up (though I guess we could if we really wanted to). I feel like he totally glosses over this point.
- He says advertising is dying because print publications are going out of business. This is plainly untrue. Many of those print publications relied on classified ads in addition to the big full page stuff. Those classified ads have moved online in both a free and paid way. They are doing exceedingly well (how many people do you know who have found an apartment from the newspaper lately?). This is a place where advertising excels (job classifieds is another one). No one ever talks about this, but this is advertising and it’s working even better than it did offline on the web!
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A good summary. To point #1 though, that’s been true in all media. The most interesting thing Ford’s doing right now is the cool tech in its cars and maybe some of its environmental initiatives, not the latest commercial of cars swerving down the mountain. The most interesting thing Target’s doing is continuing to make designer goods more affordable and boring stuff like prescription bottles more user-friendly, and all that’s far more important than their commercials – even though some of their commercials are DVR-proof for me. That hasn’t changed online. It’s just that advertising continues to be a relatively efficient (though highly imperfect) way to tell millions of people about what they’re doing.
I think you and Rick hit on the point without realizing it Noah: it’s semantics.
Sort of.
The professor is talking about old school, hard-hitting price and copy point advertising. You know “All this for just $49.99!!” style messaging.
He doesn’t seem to acknowledge that advertising can take other forms or that things other than traditional banners, print ads and TV commercials can be considered advertising.
He also doesn’t seem to get that the “vast amount of consumer information” on the web is only useful when there’s clear differentiation between products within a category. But if you’ve got a lot of parity products, then brand advertising helps you determine which of the products is the cool one, the trendy one, the classic one, the funny one, etc. Because you’re not likely to research each one. Brand advertising helps us determine which of the dozen or so similar brands we’re going to Google.
In his defense, TechCrunch gave the piece a far more provocative and incendiary title than it deserved.
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