Re: Why online advertising sucks

From: Jim Novo <jimnovo_at_sprintmail.com>
Date: Wed 28 Feb 2001 11:13:11 -0600

TERRY LEFTON <tlefton_at_thestandard.com> WROTE:

> I am the ad/mktg/sports columnist for The
> Industry Standard (recently, after 10 years
> at Brandweek) and am in the midst of researching
> my cover story on the difficulties the industry
> is facing. Yeah, we know, there's an overall
> media recession. Yeah, we know dot-coms
> advertising has gone away. And we know the
> metrics problem...

Hold it right there, no need to go further. The metrics
problem _is_ the problem.

I was selling cable advertising in the early 80's. People
understood the "targeting" pitch versus broadcast TV,
but they wanted to know how many people were watching
all these niche channels.

The broadcast people could put up numbers from Nielsen
saying basically "everybody" was watching broadcast, so
how could very many people be watching cable? The
numbers don't lie, they said. Nobody is watching these
little niche, highly targeted cable channels.

The cable people demanded direct monitoring from Nielsen
at the household level. The broadcasters told Nielsen
they'd be in deep doo-doo if they put in a system like that.
Broadcasters liked the diary method, which is more of a recall
measurement than actual tracking of behavior. Duh.

Nielsen said it was too complicated, too many different
cable boxes and channel line-ups, a real technology problem
to monitor at the household level. Cable channels were living
off scraps of media buys, nobody would do any real spending
(except for direct marketing folks, who love cheap targeted
media, as they do now on the web).

The cable industry applied pressure to the cable box makers,
and over time, got them to develop an architecture that could
support channel selection monitoring at the household level.
Nielsen finally introduced a direct box that could plug into the
cable box. The first numbers out of those boxes had Madison
Avenue and the broadcasters absolutely reeling. There were
a huge amount of people watching these targeted cable channels
after all!

It wasn't possible, the broadcasters said. It's not possible,
because the direct box numbers conflict with what the diaries
say. Next sweeps, cable's numbers got even bigger. Not long
after that Madison Avenue opened the purse for cable.

You know the rest of the story. Cable became a huge media
force and broadcast numbers continued to shrink over time.

Hey, I realize there's always going to be squish in the web
numbers, given the nature of the network. Maybe people will
continue to put up with a difference of 40% in served / delivered
numbers. But the really big cats are not going to bet the farm
until there's a least the _appearance_ that people know what the
heck is going on with the numbers. We don't even have that.

Jim
---------------------------------------------------------
Jim Novo mailto:jim_at_jimnovo.com
Author:Turning Customer Data into Profits
Learn the techniques and models used in
profitable customer-focused marketing at:
http://www.jimnovo.com





Received on Wed Feb 28 2001 - 11:13:11 CST