Shuffling Ads Around
Here’s a quick meta story: FriendFeed pointed me to Simon Young’s Google Reader shared item of a post by John Hagel about the shift of (primarily digital) advertising. Before you consider my thoughts on advertising, pause and realize just how cool (weird, meta) that little path to the data truly is. Curse you Thank you, Louis Gray, for getting me to look at FriendFeed once more.
In his post, John mentions how advertisers see the coming shifts in their business:
In the advertising world, multiple shifts are piling on top of each other and it is often hard to keep track of them, much less understand their implications. Let’s look at just some that are re-shaping the advertising world:
- Shifts from advertising placed in digital content to ads placed in social networks and applications
- Shifts from digital advertisements delivered through conventional PC’s to a growing array of mobile devices, with an increasing ability to target messages based on the physical location of the person
- Shifts in the behavior of digital users in their responsiveness to advertisements online […]
These three shifts made me frustrated, because I see them as advertisers just lazily moving their target slightly in-stream, but without adapting much beyond making a course correction for how digital users respond. Thankfully, John schools people who consider this the right way to do it a little further down the page.
John points out something really important:
Why will the Internet ultimately undermine advertising? A number of factors come into play:
- The Internet proliferates resources, all competing for the attention of people. Even the most targeted and relevant ads over time will have a harder and harder time rising above the noise.
- The Internet creates powerful options for people in terms of how they become aware of new products and services and how they obtain information about the products and services that are relevant to them.
- The Internet offers increasingly powerful tools to filter and block advertisements (and, yes, product placements will be an interesting alternative for a while, until even that space becomes so cluttered that people will mentally filter out the products)
It’s funny. The article is long-ish, and when I read the very first part of it, I was getting frustrated with what John reported about the way advertisers are viewing the online play. Not with what John Said, but instead, the mindset of advertisers as covered by him. I’m glad that I continued through, however, because his perspective on what advertisers must consider to adapt and survive are a very worthwhile payload.
See the full article here.
What do you think about the future of online advertising? Are you okay with ads in social networks? How do we balance comfortable with effective?
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Comments
we could end up with more quality content bundled with ads, like you can watch full HD episodes of abc tv shows with a few commercial breaks.
I sound like a broken record, but to me, the path of survival for those who would do business digitally is to stop helping people sell and figure out how to help people buy. There is ENORMOUS upside in that, if only they get the hang of it.
For those of you too young to know…YES there was a time before cable. Guess What? The cable company’s biggest marketing ploy was subscribers paid for television so they could avoid watching commercials. Then cable became inundated with commercials. Along came Satelite TV. Same song and dance. The VCR followed by DVR same song and dance.
Golly…remember CompuServe & Prodigy? Now that is going back a long way. The beauty of those services was the ability to exchange information without being bombarded by advertisements. You could really learn the value of a product from someone who actually used the product instead of trying to rely on the advertisement of the product for “information.” When the Internet became a flood of advertisements, people escaped to social networks.
Ok so maybe my time line here is over simplified; perhaps I made some large leaps. However from my position at the keyboard, I see a trend. I am so sick and tired of advertisements I am willing to pay to be where there are none. If you offer your service for free without advertisements, I will stay. If you overload my senses with advertisements, I will leave.
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I really like Laura Fitton´s Comment that helping people buy is key. I have had so many clients who didn´t even begin to know what language a prospective customer would use to describe their product.
But I´d really like to hear more examples, Laura. How do we help people buy?
One of the areas I have done a lot of work in is helping companies design promotions that attract the right prospects. I always recommended my customers create incentives that facilitate the purchase decision. For example, if you are selling an Enterprise marketing tool, provide a “free checklist to take to your IT department” to review your system requirements and marketing needs with them in language that you can both understand. Marketing and IT notoriously bump heads on implementing new marketing technologies. This incentive helps to remove some of the barriers, speaks to the marketing exec´s pain…and helps them to buy. Do you agree?
But still….you have to actually reach the marketing exec somehow to let him know about the tools you offer…
Chris, the trends in advertising seem to be strengthening the argument for Seth Godin’s Idea Virus more and more as technology keeps making it easier for consumers to bypass ads, even in conventional media. Heck it’s to the point now with TIVO, for example, that I get frustrated watching something live & being unable to scan through the commercials.