24 August 2010

A pretty piss-poor advertising medium.

This’ll be a mish-mash follow-up to a few posts:

image Foretellings
NostraChuckus, that uncannily somewhat accurate prognosticator who mostly deals with predicting common sense, is at it again…

Spending goes where the eyeballs are.
New Media technology is getting smaller, not bigger. Eyeballs are squinting…

image Digital Advertising Natives and Immigrants
Baby Boomers have been inundated with technology all their lives. We were the first generation of television natives.

Wired Magazine’s nail in the coffin:

image The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet
By Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff
Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline…

Dick Stroud’s take on it.

Well … Wired is supposed to be provocative.  But it has a point – one I was hammering on in those posts above.

And the article mirrors other points I’ve made through the years:

image The Web was built by engineers, not editors. So nobody paid much attention to the fact that HTML-constructed Web sites — the most advanced form of online media and design — turned out to be a pretty piss-poor advertising medium …

The ineffectual banner ad, created (indeed by the founders of this magazine) in 1994 — and never much liked by anyone in the marketing world — still remains the foundation of display advertising on the Web.

Consumers weren’t motivated by display ads, as evidenced by the share of the online audience that bothered to click on them. (According to a 2009 comScore study, only 16 percent of users ever click on an ad, and 8 percent of users accounted for 85 percent of all clicks.)

Finally, after years of experimentation, content companies came to a disturbing conclusion: The Web did not work. It would never bring in the bucks.

There are dissenting views in the piece(s) – and the Web defenders make good points.  I have my own views.

But this blog is only interested in advertising – and Baby Boomers.  From Foretellings:

  1. The visual power of the web will fade as more people use handheld devices.  Goodbye, fancy-schmancy web sites. People will get bored sifting through it all when they can find what they need with their smartphones.
  2. image How this will play out, I don’t know – but the ‘web’ needs to be rethought.  Accessing a page on a desktop or laptop is not the same as accessing it on a smartphone.  There will have to be two separate ‘webs’ for large screens, small screens. People will get very tired very fast clumsily negotiating bulky pages on handheld devices. Usability cannot be ignored.  Laptops and Desktops will only be utilized for deep research or visual treats. 
  3. That silly retronym “traditional advertising” will remain the premiere force for introducing people to a product or service, along with sustaining its shelf life. Television, print, radio, and billboard ads will continue to have the visceral power they’ve always had – if only for their sheer size, simplicity, and cutting-edge audio/visual qualities.  Advertising on smartphones will be considered an annoyance, invasive, and rather dinky – while marketing (coupons on steroids, and more) will flourish and dominate.

More reading:

Is 500 million a big number? (Nigel Hollis)

Word-of-mouth may not translate to loyalty (eMarketer)

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.