Re: Why Online Advertising Sucks

From: John Gaskill <gm_at_info-central-usa.com>
Date: Fri 09 Mar 2001 09:29:14 -0600

TERRY LEFTON <tlefton_at_thestandard.com> WROTE:

>What we don't know is why more big brands
>aren't investing. Advertising, in our opinion,
>has NOT followed eyeballs."

TO WHICH SHARON GILLENWATER <sharon_at_fidget.com> REPLIED:

>It's all about expectations. Do advertisers expect
>billboards, TV commercials and print ads to result
>in sales that are directly trackable to those particular
>ads? Of course not.

Au contrere!

Many advertisers and agencies buying direct-selling or
"image" advertisements using print, outdoor and
broadcast media spend lots of money determining
which of their ads work and how much better one
ad works over another. "Work" is judged in terms
of increases in sales, generating information requests,
etc., not awareness.

> Advertisers have grown to expect these kind of results
> from online because results can be measured so precisely.
> There definitely IS a backlash right now. Who is to blame?
> Perhaps the online publishers and agencies that miseducated
> their clients by setting such high ROI expectations. But more
> likely it's the dot com clients who are now nursing massive
> hangovers--or are out of business altogether--from runaway
> spending on foolish campaigns (both online AND offline) that
> went nowhere. In the past, I was frequently surprised at the
> number of clients who were NOT tracking campaign
> performance as they should.

Was it too high ROI expectations, or too high a price
for the medium? A lower price for the medium raises
the ROI, all else held equal. Simple arithmetic.

As for the argument about the results being too easy to
compute. Ooohhh pleeeeeze... That is a big selling
plus for online as a medium. The fact that an advertiser
can precisely measure simply makes the medium accountable
to even the dumbest agencies and advertisers, i.e., the
ones who DON'T measure their offline ads' performance.

Advertisers will adopt online media when the ROI experience
offered is similar to or better than that offered by other media.

>Let's face it, we will never go back to the kind of results
>that we saw in the early days of the Internet--that was
>about novelty. But online advertising is not less effective
>than any other kind of advertising. There IS branding value
>and there CAN be significant ROI if you craft and track your
>campaigns carefully. People who label online advertising in
>general as "ineffective" have not done their homework.

The problem with most "ineffective" online advertising
is that it would be ineffective offline. It is poor quality.

None of us has to go too far to find someone who doesn't
believe that advertising works, even when executed properly,
but most of us know otherwise.

It seems to me that our job is to demonstrate to people that
online advertising can and does work, then go about
showing them how to make their message work, even if
it means changing their message to fit the medium, or
changing our beliefs about how the medium "should work"
as opposed to how it is actually working.

Regards all,

John

John Gaskill
gm_at_info-central-usa.com
http://info-central-usa.com



Received on Fri Mar 09 2001 - 09:29:14 CST