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Advertiser Perceptions latest survey of 2,047 ad executives (published twice yearly) — as published by Online Media Daily — reveals growing pessimism among ad buyers about traditional forms of advertising. I view this study as significant, because it speaks directly with people who are making decisions about spending money. Note the highlights in red.
The U.K. next year will become the first major economy in which the Internet overtakes television as the No. 1 advertising medium, according to a new forecast from WPP’s GroupM unit. The new prediction follows a report released last month by GroupM, the world’s largest buyer of media, which estimated that the Internet would become the dominant ad medium in Sweden during 2008, and that the U.K and Denmark were “likely to be the next in line.” GroupM now forecasts that the U.K. will likely pass that mark by the end of 2008 when the Internet will account for 24.8% of British ad spending, just behind a projected 26.0% hare for television.
By now, we hope that every media company in the U.S. is paying attention.
When I read these things, I always think of the great line from Bob Papper during a conference at Ball State:
“Television didn’t hurt magazines by taking away their readers; they hurt magazines by taking away their advertising.”
A new study by UK web testing firm SciVisum predicts the end of Web 2.0 in 2008, but the logic misses the mark.
According to Deri Jones, CEO of SciVisum, “Consumers and companies will continue to adopt a nomadic attitude towards web 2.0 websites, flocking to the ‘next big thing’ until the market becomes so saturated that consumers will actually be turned off.”
Or not.
From the SciVisum press release:
SciVisum cites the main drivers for Web 2.0’s decline as the exponential growth in the number of User Generated Content (UGC) websites facing a backlash from cautious advertisers not wanting their brand to appear in front of unsuitable content.
And this is why I completely disagree with the prediction. The view is from a purely Media 1.0 perspective and discounts the reality that advertising is content in the sweeping world of Media 2.0.
Social media (the definition of “Web 2.0″) is what the Web is really all about, so to suggest that it will die because advertisers won’t support it is, well, naive. On the contrary, I think it’s going to reach a new level with the ability to aggregate profiles and interaction from any number of social sites. I’m on MySpace, Facebook, Linked In and others, and you can count on somebody to put those together for me.
Social networking doesn’t require money. Hell, you can build a social site for free with Ning. It requires passion and people of a like mind on any subject.
So to suggest that its demise will come from advertisers not wanting their brands associated with user-generated content is ridiculous. That suggestion speaks more about the state of advertising than what will or won’t happen with Web 2.0.
(hat tip to Duncan at TechCrunch)
Advertising is content in Media 2.0. Traffic to Elf Yourself matches The New York Times in one month’s time, according to Alexa:
This cost Office Max virtually nothing compared to the ad budget necessary to reach those millions of people via the Times.
If you need more evidence of where we’re headed, take a look at a new Accenture study out this morning, “The Future of Digital Advertising: a Rigorous Focus on Performance.”
From the report:
At a macro level, the industry is facing a zero-sum game: advertising dollars will migrate to where they are most effective. At a micro level, those players who fail to respond to market demand will suffer. But the underlying change will be a greater ability on the part of advertisers to reallocate their advertising investment more responsively in line with performance. As a result, those that really do deliver the right performance will — quite rightly — win out.
This is just the latest blow to those who’ve staked their business futures on the reach-frequency game, the people who count page views as the top metric of value. They’re not, and while there are still plenty of people with lots of money to spend on it, the smart media company will pursue other avenues as well.
Advertising is content in Media 2.0. Here we have OfficeMax creating one of those creative holiday virals that people will use for the next month. It’s called “Elf Yourself,” a cute Flash application that allows you to put your face, the face of your dog, the face of your boss, or anybody’s face into the body of a dancing elf. Up to four are allowed, and they dance a stupid dance and wish holiday greetings.
Dumb, yes. Smart, hell yes. It’s a branding play that doesn’t require buying ad space next to somebody’s content, and that’s a small part of the problem for contemporary media. It’s participatory, interactive and fun, and it uses the energy of the users to pass the message.
It’s not the first, just one of the latest.
I’ve been following a fascinating discussion at TechCrunch over the holiday weekend, and it’s a worthwhile read for anybody who follows this stuff.
It began with a rare guest post (The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos) on the site Thanksgiving day by Dan Ackerman Greenberg, co-founder of the “viral marketing company, The Commotion Group.” It got my attention, because, well, who knew there were “viral marketing companies?” I mean, isn’t the whole idea of viral marketing that it’s, um, viral?
Well, it’s not. It’s “managed” by guys like this, and the post was a how-to list of their secret sauce. Fascinating. Provocative. And ethically questionable. Here’s an example on how to get a video to an important level on YouTube:
3. Core Strategy: Getting onto the “Most Viewed” page
Now that a video is ready to go, how the hell is it going to attract 100,000 viewers?The core concept of video marketing on YouTube is to harness the power of the site’s traffic. Here’s the idea: something like 80 million videos are watched each day on YouTube, and a significant number of those views come from people clicking the “Videos” tab at the top. The goal is to get a video on that Videos page, which lists the Daily Most Viewed videos.
If we succeed, the video will no longer be a single needle in the haystack of 10,000 new videos per day. It will be one of the twenty videos on the Most Viewed page, which means that we can grab 1/20th of the clicks on that page! And the higher up on the page our video is, the more views we are going to get.
So how do we get the first 50,000 views we need to get our videos onto the Most Viewed list?
- Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.
- Forums: We start new threads and embed our videos. Sometimes, this means kickstarting the conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different users. Yes, it’s tedious and time-consuming, but if we get enough people working on it, it can have a tremendous effect.
- MySpace: Plenty of users allow you to embed YouTube videos right in the comments section of their MySpace pages. We take advantage of this.
- Facebook: Share, share, share. We’ve taken Dave McClure’s advice and built a sizeable presence on Facebook, so sharing a video with our entire friends list can have a real impact. Other ideas include creating an event that announces the video launch and inviting friends, writing a note and tagging friends, or posting the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video.
- Email lists: Send the video to an email list. Depending on the size of the list (and the recipients’ willingness to receive links to YouTube videos), this can be a very effective strategy.
- Friends: Make sure everyone we know watches the video and try to get them to email it out to their friends, or at least share it on Facebook.
Each video has a shelf life of 48 hours before it’s moved from the Daily Most Viewed list to the Weekly Most Viewed list, so it’s important that this happens quickly. As I mentioned before, when done right, this is a tremendously successful strategy.
The post infuriated TechCrunch readers, who left over 400 comments slamming what Greenberg does for a living. It apparently made him feel bad, so TechCrunch let him post another guest entry (Follow Up To The Viral Video Post: Dan Wants Another Word), in which he backtracked on much of what was stated in the original post. That, too, didn’t go over well with readers.
Trust me, it’s a good read. And the lesson is Umair’s “good beats evil” in the new world. We simply MUST accept that empowered consumers are in charge these days, and they’re using that power to escape the kind of manipulative crap that marketeurs have foisted upon them for decades. By pulling back the curtain on his own manipulative practices, Greenberg ran into the buzz saw that is angry consumers.
You may read this and come away thinking, “Gee, maybe we should be doing some of this stuff.” In fact, there are a lot of smart tactics listed, and perhaps that’s correct. If you choose this path, however, do so with extreme caution: caveat venditor, let the seller beware. Proceed at your own risk.
So Google has dissed the bloggers who participate in the horrible PayPerPost ad scheme by removing their page rank altogether. PayPerPost is the hideously deceptive practice of IZEA that pays bloggers to make posts about advertiser products without revealing they are, well, ads.
Some people are saying that what Google has done is censorship, but I don’t view it that way. Google historically has done nothing that I view as contrary to their “Do No Evil” mantra, and this PayPerPost crap is certainly evil. The more I watch this stuff, the more I conclude that — at least for me — I’d rather have Google policing things than anybody else, including any government anywhere.
UPDATE: Per Andy’s suggestion, here’s a link to PayPerPost founder Ted Murphy’s blog entry on the subject.
Media companies live and breathe — in large part — through the benevolence of the agencies that control vast resources of ad dollars for their clients. This relationship is a part of what’s being disrupted by Media 2.0, and it’s one of the most interesting elements of the overall disruption.
A little review first. This blog examines media disruption as the fruit of the cultural shift from modernism (I think and reason, therefore I understand) to postmodernism (I participate, therefore I understand). Changes in culture aren’t zero sum games, unless there’s a bayonet forcing the issue. In the West, it’s more like evolution; that which was remains, albeit with new adoptive characteristics.
So it comes as no surprise to read the following headline from a Research Brief from the Center for Media Research:
Measurement Seen As Hurdle to Ad Spend On Emerging Media
Well, duh! The hegemony that controls mass marketing is dependent upon complex measurement systems. Once established and agreed upon by all parties, success is defined in terms of who can outsmart, outspend, manipulate or otherwise manage the systems to their advantage. Take away the system, and the hegemony demands another.
But this is the modernist way. We establish laws and rules, which are then manipulated for us to get what we want. And by “we,” I’m talking about those who are in a position to do something about it. The rest of the culture can only sit by and be used. This is the essential flaw in a cultural system based solely on the rule of law. It may produce order, but that order can be manipulated by those in a position to do so.
This is the same dynamic at work in our courts, where “the system” has created its own laws through the process of judicial activism found in “case law.” Case law is the process by which one court’s ruling is used in other court rulings to modify laws created by the law makers of the culture, our legislators. The problem, of course, is that case law is viewed as THE law, so judges don’t judge at all; they merely interpret. When justice is the only permitted outcome, mercy goes out the door. This whole justice/mercy thing is why we need judges in the first place, but that’s not what we have today.
And so it is with media and advertising. We all sit back and say, “Show me the rules,” parenthetically adding, “so I can plan how to manipulate them to get what I want.” Here’s the key part of the above-referenced article:
The gap in the knowledge base of most advertisers with regard to new/emerging media, says the report, exists not only because of the wide variety of options, but also because of the constantly changing dynamic nature of the space. Given the amount of change, metrics do not generate the same level of confidence as in traditional media.70% of the larger advertisers, those spending $50MM and up on media, were more comfortable with current vehicles. These respondents reported satisfaction with the measurement of traditional media, while their level of satisfaction was 60% for measuring new/emerging media.
So Madison Avenue won’t be comfortable playing with the Web until there is a locked-down mechanism in place for continuing the same old system they’ve always had. While I can understand and sympathize with them, there’s a big problem with that thinking.
Its name is Google, that clever group of folks who don’t pay a lick of attention to Madison Avenue and have chosen, instead, to push forward along other lines. That’s not to say that Google wouldn’t take their money, but the truth is they don’t need it. This is because the company shakes hands with the Web in a way that works in the best interests of everybody, not just the ad agencies in New York who controlled all the cash in the old world. As the Web grows, so does Google. The company has their measurement metrics, but they’re based on the Web as the platform, and this doesn’t mesh with the way Madison Avenue does business, for the hegemony requires platforms who play by its rules.
So the old value proposition is in decay, and the best it can do is fold its arms, stomp its foot and demand that this thing called the Web give it what it wants. It won’t. It doesn’t have to. And Madison Avenue is, well, screwed.
I’ve been saying for years that the soul of the disruption gutting the business model of traditional media and marketing is the people formerly known as the audience. None of this makes any sense without that basic assumption. As I tell groups in presentations, it’s all about people:
Now comes new evidence of this in the form of privacy groups banding together to create a “Do Not Target” list for people who’d rather not participate in the Holy Grail of web advertising — behavioral targeting. Here’s the lead sentence from PC World:
A coalition of nine privacy and consumer groups have proposed a U.S. do-not-track list that would allow consumers to opt out of advertising efforts that track their movements online.…The do-not-track list, similar in some ways to a do-not-call telemarketing list maintained by the FTC, would allow consumers to take control of their personal information online, Cooper (Mark Cooper, research director for the Consumer Federation of America) said. While they would originally have to download the list and manually enter sites to block into security software, the privacy coalition expects that browser developers would create tools to automate that process, he said.
“This is a single step for consumers, and this is completely needed,” said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum.
Such a list would not be good news for advertising companies. Dave Morgan of Tacoda told Advertising Age that such a list would actually defeat the idea of anonymity that the Web boasts.
“It runs into the core issue of, we don’t want to take the anonymity away. This isn’t a consumer-led revolution like do-not-call was. … This is an advocate looking for a cause issue,
That may well be the case, and this is just a proposal for now, but this business with Facebook wanting to use private profile data to target members when they’re not on Facebook puts a big weapon in the hands of these consumer groups.
Nothing will ever be enough for those being disrupted, and that’s becoming increasingly evident as we watch various companies respond to decay in their business model. What needs to happen is that the media and advertising worlds have to start paying attention to the people who are running away from them.
How about talking with the targets instead of trying to hit them?
As a student of life, culture and media, little surprises me anymore and especially when it involves humankind’s propensity to greed. Much of the reaction to the Microsoft/Facebook announcement yesterday is making my caution flags ripple unfurled in the wind, because it has “greed” written all over it.
An Advertising Age article points to a meeting on November 6th between Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg and a select group of advertising executives to “unveil a new way of advertising online.”
Facebook is keeping mum about exactly what it is unveiling at the Nov. 6 event, but ad-industry executives familiar with the company’s plans said the social network is looking to better use the data its users voluntarily offer up on their profiles. Of course, that much seems like a no-brainer (although it’s actually not easy to implement). But less obviously, a couple of industry executives familiar with the company’s plans suggest Facebook could use some of what it knows about people — and their relationships with others on the site, what is known as the “social graph” — to target them off Facebook (emphasis mine) as well.
If that niggles your privacy concerns, it should. Hell, I’m a Facebook member, and I can guarantee you I don’t want the information I’ve given them — or that they’ve gathered — to be used to serve me ads elsewhere. And I can guarantee you that I’m not alone.
Look, I support behavioral targeting. I think that’s fair game. But to use information I voluntarily gave Facebook to help the targeting process is unethical, to say the least. But again, nothing surprises me when it comes to greed, and Facebook needs to be a bit little lot greedy to support a $15 billion valuation.
Nobody understands this stuff like Dave Morgan of Tacoda. Dave has — in many ways — written the book on behavioral targeting, and he told me via email this morning that like all things new, it’ll take time. He also sounded a cautionary note:
It all depends on whether they give the consumer more value with the ads that they deliver them, and on the core principles of notice, transparency and choice. They have to be very careful about being perceived as creepy. What makes them different than more classic behavioral targeting is the large amount of very personal information that people share with them on Facebook, many times with an expectation — which may be incorrect — that only their friends can see it.
Notice, transparency and choice. For Facebook to live by those principles, its privacy policy is going to need a little overhauling, and the question is will its members fully understand what’s taking place?
Web strategist Jeremiah Owyang doesn’t necessarily think so, because Microsoft — whose “Passport” concept met with significant early backlash from privacy advocates like the Electronic Freedom Foundation — will now have access to personal data through a side door. Here’s what’s at stake, according to Jeremiah:
1) Facebook knows who you are: your name, your gender, where you live, your martial and political status, sexual preference, age, where you work, the list goes on. The funny thing is, you’ve voluntarily given that information up.2) The Graph: They also know who you connect to, who you talk to, and what you say to them (you don’t own those private message ya know).
3) Gestures: Sure, up to one third of all profile information is bogus, but what about those unsaid gestures: What people do is more important than what they say. What apps you use, how frequent, what and who you click on.
This thing about Facebook is either going to be a new level in the world of targeted media, or it’s going to blow up in Facebook’s, well, face.
I have no problem with Facebook targeting me within its application. By being a member, I’ve given them that option. It’s not inexpensive software to maintain, and the membership is free, so I think it’s a fair trade. But there’s a word for taking the information I’ve given them for that purpose, and using it in any way to validate a ridiculous corporate valuation. It’s called evil.
I’ve written to Facebook to ask what will happen to/with my information, if I cancel my membership. I’ll let you know what they say.
(Thanks to Doc for the link to Jeremiah)
How truly hollow and arrogant ring the words of those entrepreneurs business concerns who are working so hard to bring command and control back to media. None of these people understand — or wish to understand — that the horse has left the barn; it’s all about empowered consumers today, and unless that is the starting point for new business development, anything else sounds just ridiculous.
New media economist Umair Haque writes today about a new application from Blackarrow designed to stop people from fast-forwarding commercials via PVRs.
Who’s missing from the pseudo value chain at the bottom of the screen?You guessed it - consumers.
I guess I could wax lyrical about the economics of connected consumption, why the shift of control to the edges is inexorable, etc…
But honestly…lolz. How can you think strategically about any kind of business (let alone advertising) in 2007 without factoring consumers into the value chain?
The answer’s simply - you can’t.
Meanwhile, Dan Gillmor is in Toronto (where I wish I was) at the Online News Association annual gathering. He’s on a panel described thusly: Learn how to harness the passion and creativity of your community to become a local sensation and a meaningful online gathering place.
He rightly grasps the arrogance of the wording here and replied:
With respect to the writer of that description, what hokum.The word “harness” is singularly inappropriate in this context. It reflects traditional media’s belief that the audience — the community — wants or needs to be treated like a herd of horses.
We don’t need taming. We need places where we can have vital conversations about our communities.
Are you beginning to see what I mean? I’ve been around media for 37 years, and it’s always been this way (us thinking we had such “harnessing” power), but it seemed innocent years ago. Today, however, we’re seeing it for what it is — the willful manipulation of others for our own benefit. And guess what? The manipulatees don’t like it and probably never did.
I came across a pending workshop on “landing page optimization,” something I certainly think is important. But then I got to thinking about how this is just another attempt by marketeurs to hang onto their sense of importance in a world that’s been turned upside down. The assumption behind the concept is that a smart cookie can manipulate people into doing what he or she wants them to do. I know that’s harsh, but it’s true.
If we can’t manage how people relate to us, then what good are we?
Gord Hotchkiss also noted this in today’s MediaPost SearchInsider:
Last week, I explored the disconnect between how advertisers define Nirvana; the ability to control consumer and persuade them at will by inundating them with advertising; and what consumers dream about: authentic and reliable information on needed products and services. There…(is)…the nuisance cost to the consumer of wading through an earlobe-deep sea of irrelevant and uninvited advertising: zapped TV commercials, blaring billboards, glaring signage, email spam, ubiquitous interstitials and pop-ups, preloads…or one of the zillions of other ways advertisers choose to scream at you.
Notchkiss goes on to talk about the idea of advertisers as “infomediaries,” a term originated in the 1999 book, “Net Worth.”
What we have here is nothing less than a war, between advertisers and consumers. Actually, I think it’s been underway for decades — described in the battle plan books of mass marketing gurus. The problem is that consumers have already won, and our unwillingness to see that is leading us down paths that are increasingly visible as self-serving.
In this war, we have to surrender to win.
I’m suffering from the system overload that I’m sure other media observers get when the sheer volume of things to write about overwhelms the ability to spit out the kind of commentary it all deserves. Between phone calls, I spent the entire day yesterday reading and thinking, and it didn’t seem all that productive. Hence, the diagnosis of system overload.
And when this happens, it usually means (for me) a time of stepping back, a season to follow the dots and see where they lead. I’ve got a lot of uncomfortable feelings that need clarification.
Is Steve Rubel, a blogger I’ve followed since he first began, correct in predicting a crash in the pay-per-click world? My gut says he’s wrong, but, I mean, this is Steve Rubel! He gives five reasons why he feels this way, but Steve runs in the world of big-money marketers, one with an inherent bias towards the status quo. Besides, I don’t think they’re the people buying these kinds of ads from Google, and there’s no survey of them (that I know of) to see whether they think the things work or not.
I mean, this is Google, folks. The “recession” Steve predicts would be a recession for Google, which I view as the wishful thoughts of Madison Avenue (Oh please, God, let them collapse and prove we’re right).
Then there’s Scripps splitting itself into two pieces (seems to be a trend), and the two pieces are telling. One consists of its popular cable entities and all web properties. The other is its newspapers and television stations. I guess the hope is that the latter won’t be a drag on the former, but what does this say about those older properties (and the people who work there)?
Perhaps my malaise is due, in part, to participation in a heady online discussion (via Poynter’s Online News list) about the future of advertiser-supported media. It all began with Roy Peter Clark’s article, Your Duty to Read the Paper. There’s a ton of cynicism out there and even more anachronistic clinging to old models and methods. There’s also debate about whether there’s enough online ad money to support the traditional newsgathering process.
This issue of ad money is a theme repeated by Beth Comstock, president of Integrated Media at NBC Universal. She told Reuters:
I’m getting to the point where I feel like every answer to every business development pitch is ‘We’re going to be advertiser supported.’ … There are not going to be enough advertising dollars in the marketplace. No matter how clever we are, no matter what the format is.
You see, these kinds of things don’t make any sense to me, because I don’t view anything about the Web and web advertising as static. Therefore, I think it can be very misleading to try and understand shifts and trends in such a manner. Everybody has a point-of-view, and it depends on where you’re standing.
The view from Madison Avenue is very different than the view from Silicon Valley, and mine is sort of in-between, although I certainly tilt to the west. Ms. Comstock looks at the ad numbers and rightly states that there isn’t enough enough to support millions of “ad-supported” business models. This flows from a belief that “ad-supported” has only one definition: I make content and advertisers pay enough in ads to support the creation of that content plus a little (a lot of) profit for me. In this sense, she’s absolutely correct, and what does that say about all of the ad-supported models that are springing up at the local level?
Steve Safran and I beat our heads against the wall trying to convince people that the time to act is NOW. Do you need any more evidence that this to understand that the advertiser pie can only be split so many ways before it all collapses, because no viable platforms exist anymore?
And what do you do as a local media company in attacking the matter of advertising? Do you target money that’s in the Madison Avenue pipeline that’s looking for places to be spent? Do you target money that’s being spent locally, albeit not on your properties? Or do you begin with assumptions about tomorrow and point your ship in that direction?
So you see, there’s a lot of confusion out there, and I think that’s to be expected at a time like this. For me, though, I must stay with the firm belief that advertising is what’s really being disrupted and that — like everything else in the personal media revolution — it’s coming from the bottom, not the top. Companies that enable this will thrive.
One such company is called AdReady. It provides user-friendly software for the making and serving animated display ads by small businesses, and Nick Gonzalez at TechCrunch is right when he writes about the future:
With Google’s purchase of DoubleClick and Yahoo’s SmartAds initiative, the focus is being drawn back on display advertising. A tool like AdReady helps even the little guys get in to the growing market. That is, unless Google does something like this too.
This is the kind of initiative that I’m convinced local media companies need to be providing to seed a growing local online advertising opportunity.
And finally, there’s this disquieting little piece of information, also from TechCrunch. China — yes, China — has developed peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing that’s 50 times faster than BitTorrent in this country. Duncan Riley cites a Thomas Crampton interview with Ogilvy China’s Kaiser Kuo, during which Kuo claims to have watched a DVD-quality download of “24″ with 2.2% downloaded after only 3 minutes via China’s Blin.cn. Riley, who’s from Australia, then writes of the future ramifications, and I find this both ironic and chilling.
…without the artificial market restrictions imposed on P2P networks in the United States by the RIAA and the MPAA, Chinese companies have been free to innovate and are now producing superior web technology in P2P sharing, and a whole range of related industries. If you think it’s bad that China dominates the market for consumer goods, imagine that today companies in China have already created the next wave of P2P innovation and are thriving, perhaps ironically in a Communist country, with more freedoms than their American counterparts. It’s not unreasonable to consider that next year and into the future that much of what we do online may end up being based on Chinese designed technology and programming, and not good ol’ fashioned American know-how.
I guess that’s what’s really pulled me into the deep end of the pool today. Only in America, it seems, is free enterprise really not free. It’s a game played by the haves, and that’s what’s under attack by the triumph of personal media over mass media.
I think we’re headed for great change in this country, the thought of which generally makes me go quiet.
Dear Eyewonder,
Please remove these irritating rollover ads, before somebody hires a hit man to kill the poor geek depicted in them. I mean, the guy has, well, a face for friggin’ radio, man. Couldn’t you find some cute model to pitch the ads? Why did you select this guy?
Look, nobody’s perfect, but this is an ad, for crying out loud.
These things are worse than bloody pop-ups and reach a level of irritability second only to the rantings of some car dealers who’ll do anything to get noticed. I notice them, all right, and promise never to do business there. Here in Dallas, we have commercials for a dealer that keep screaming “eleven, eight, eighty-eight” over and over again. I think it’s a Kia dealer, but I’m not sure (how’s that for a ringing endorsement of the ad’s effectiveness?).
AUGH! There. I feel better.
Terry
Here is the latest in my ongoing series of essays about local media in our postmodern world. I think this is one of the most important I’ve written, because it argues that the real media disruption these days isn’t media at all, but advertising. I also argue that Google — and perhaps all search — should be left out of Web ad statistics, because they skew the overall ad picture.
Enjoy.
I’ve decided that spam is playing a significant role in the dismantling of the mass marketing paradigm. You’re free to disagree, of course, but I think that the unintended consequence of spam is that it teaches about hype and to pay attention to advertising claims. How many of you aren’t more skeptical of all ad claims (and all media), because spam has taught you that there’s an element of spam in every unwanted (commercial) message?
Aren’t you automatically more suspicious of anybody’s “selling?”
Now think about the millions of young people who’ve been similarly taught, and you’ll see what I mean.
I’ve come to this conclusion after reading that my “penis will make more shadow than a tree.” I’m reminded of the TV ads for the old grapefruit diet pills. “They’re so darned easy, they’ve GOT to work!” Yeah, right.
Speaking of truth-in-advertising, have you heard about NBC’s game with the ratings for “Heroes?” Nielsen provides special provisions for syndicated programming that allows them to use multiple dayparts over a week to determine ratings. This is because syndicated shows don’t all run on the same day or in the same daypart. Well, NBC (Who else?) has creatively adapted the provision for “Heroes,” because they ran the opening week’s episode on Monday AND Saturday nights. The Nielsen number they’re selling combines both viewings. Nice.
The problem for advertisers is they really have no idea how the show actually performed in its original time period, so some are up-in-arms.
There will be more of this, I predict, as the status quo continues to try and hide the realities of disruptive innovations.
Now where are my penis pills?
Staci Kramer at Paid Content notes that the NFL is in discussions to create an ad network across its 32 team sites. The league would sell some ads and the teams would keep some for themselves.
…the move could bring in significant revenue by adding national advertisers to the team sites. The sites also could make money from ads sold against NFL video that would be offered; teams producing their own video still could sell those ads.
Let me add that once an organization discovers the value of creating an ad network, there’s no reason that network can’t be expanded. This is exactly what we’re trying to teach local media companies about their own markets. If this happens, the NFL will be able to serve ads not only to their own sites but also to any related site that wants to get onboard. It’s a very smart play for male demos in the evolving world of online advertising.
Since I work in the biz, headlines like this one from MediaDailyNews get my attention:
Despite Challenges, Agency Predicts TV Ad Spending To Hit New High
The header is accurate, but it describes global television advertising. In the U.S., things are quite different:
In the U.S. TV advertising share is expected to erode amid a relatively tepid domestic advertising economy.“The continued slump in the U.S. housing market has led to a sharp drop in property and construction advertising, particularly property classifieds in newspapers. This, and the recent credit squeeze, has led us to downgrade our forecast for growth in the US (emphasis mine) this year from 3.3% to 2.5%,” the agency (Publicis’ ZenithOptimedia Group) predicted.
I guess it’s a matter of perspective. From the agency’s point of view, it doesn’t matter which country is running the ads. That’s little comfort to the broadcast industry in this country.
