
Why Traditional Ads Work, and Digital Ads Don't - nreece
http://www.baekdal.com/publishing/why-traditional-ads-work-and-digital-ads-dont
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wvenable
From the article:

> _Advertising works in traditional magazines because they are extending the
> content. It is part of the content itself. It provides editorial value._

The magazines shown are pretty much advertisements themselves -- the editorial
value of the content is very low. Look to magazines that aren't about shilling
product and I suspect the difference is minimal.

> _Traditional advertising extends the content, and enhances the value. Online
> advertising disrupts the content, clutters up the page, and lowers the
> value._

On a site I used to work on, we handled our own advertising and only allowed
ads that matched the subject area of the site. We had an unprecedented click-
through rate on our ads. In many cases, users considered the ads as valuable
as the content.

So I agree with the author in that ads related to the content do better than
ads which don't. However, his conclusion is completely wrong -- there isn't
anything specifically online or offline about it.

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Ardit20
"We had an unprecedented click-through rate on our ads"

Around what percentage if you do not mind saying, and also the general subject
area of the site, i,e IT?

Just curious.

~~~
wvenable
Over the entire history of the site, one of our more clever types of ads has a
1.54% click through rate on 41 million impressions. The general subject area
of the site: Coffee.

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GiraffeNecktie
I'm a little skeptical when people say "this ad works and that ad doesn't"
without providing even a shred of data to back up their claims.

~~~
ilamont
That's been a pattern in the traditional print media industry (lack of data on
ad effectiveness) but publishers throughout the 20th century were able to
exploit this quite nicely by spinning whatever data was available
(demographics, circulation) as well as intangibles such as the
magazine/newspaper "brand" to justify extremely high prices.

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luu
The author never defines “work”, so perhaps his definition isn't related to
making money, but it seems to be that ads work pretty well by that definition.
For click-through ads, it's easy to measure how much money is made (on both
sides), and people simply wouldn't use them if they don't work.

It's harder for the advertiser to measure the effectiveness of display ads,
but that's true in both the online and offline case. Yahoo has done a
controlled study showing that display ads effect both online and offline sales
(with the usual disclaimers that it was in one particular case, at one point
in time, and that the results may not generalize, etc.).

Traditional advertising firms don't have research arms that publish on the
effectiveness of their techniques, and they don't even seem to try to do
controlled studies, A/B testing, etc., to figure out which ads are more
effective. It's harder to do in the offline case, but that's no excuse; it can
be done: Capital One is known for doing that with their mailings. It's even
harder, but still possible, to do something similar if you're a retailer
taking out an ad in newspapers and magazines.

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credo
I think the post misses one key difference between traditional and digital ads

Traditional ads (in printed magazines, newspapers etc) are generally part of
leisure-time reading. The reader spends a lot of time on the publication and
so ads in the publiations have a lot of impact.

Web reading/browsing is generally a short activity and often a work-time
activity. Readers spend a very short amount of time on any single website
(often less than a minute) and so they are much less likely to look at any ads
on the site.

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notahacker
Cherry picked examples.

Some magazine ads are relevant to the content (particularly when the magazine
intentionally runs features relevant to certain advertising bases and then
approaches relevant advertisers). Most aren't.

Some websites curate ads very carefully, some even integrating affiliate links
and algorithmic recommendations to a far greater extent than is possible on
paper.

It's a little easier to quantify digital "ad-blindness" though...

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stcredzero
> _They are incredibly adapt at spotting advertisements, and will simply block
> them from memory._

[Citation Needed]

[Editing Needed]

In the comments, there's some discussion about ad quality. Users should be
allowed to upvote or downvote ads. (Maybe upvote only is better?)

~~~
notahacker
I seem to remember Facebook tried upvotes and downvotes for ads. I'm guessing
the downvote button disappeared because too many people used it.

I do have a suspicion they used the data though... I dont see very many online
moneymaking scheme scam ads these days

~~~
chronomex
They still have an X button in the corner of the ad, and a "thumbs-up" button
below it.

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woodall
I think digital adds actual succeed in places where print ads fail miserably.
More and more people are shopping online. Many people have paypal/CC/debit
that they have/can use online.

Print ads do not drive you to the store to buy a product, however,
online/digital ads bring a product to you; you can buy it right away. Of
course there are ways in which the experience can be better, but not every
thing is always perfect.

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tofumatt
Check out Fusion Ads (<http://fusionads.net/>) and The Deck
(<http://decknetwork.net/>) for vetted, pretty, and usually at least somewhat
relevant ads that are online. Banner ads and cluttered pages usually suck, but
I've probably clicked on 80% of the Fusion/Deck ads I've seen.

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chaostheory
Digital ads can better track their effectiveness pretty well, traditional ads
IMO not so well. Until that gap closes, it's harder to say which is better and
which is worse.

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antics
But might the same criticism be leveled at web content in general? So the
advertisements are disposable, but then, so is most of the content.

My suspicion is that people have a penchant for content that they actually
hold, because tangible things have intrinsic value (more so if they're
pretty). When people start valuing the content, they (IMO) will also start
valuing the advertisements.

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w1ntermute
By his logic, if you were to extend Google's policy of selecting ads based on
the page content to ads with images, you would have a successful model for
banner ads. I don't know if that's true though, because whereas the flashier a
magazine ad is, the better, people prefer more toned-down ads online, since
they're already getting bombarded with so much content.

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nobody_nowhere
Malarkey! Balderdash!!

The author claims that traditional ads work because they 'extend the content'
of magazines, and digital ads don't work because they don't extend the
content.

It's all in how you execute. There are myriad strategies for pairing online
ads with content. Some work well, others don't. Some are cheap, others are
expensive. No different from print.

However -- depending on your goal -- this may not even be necessary. I work
with direct response advertisers who place ads with massive ROI: cost per
acquisitions with 4-5x margin. It's a little more difficult to measure if
you're not selling things online, but there's plenty of evidence it works.

Further, it's not an either/or proposition. A good campaign hits numerous
channels. And print, as a channel, is on life support. Tons of important
decision makers rarely, if ever, pick up a dead tree.

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vaksel
they don't...the difference is that with digital ads you get to track
conversions...with traditional ads you don't.

\+ traditional ads have much higher production values and get to tell their
message in 30 seconds, instead of just having a small banner to do it in

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zeynel1
\--advertising works in traditional magazines because they are extending the
content--

i liked the pages that he gave as examples but i believe that the reader who
buys -elle- does not care what is -advertising- and what is -content- for the
consumer-girl who reads fashion magazines -marketing is the product-

think about the magazine as a kind of mirror - the girl reading the magazine
already has a signature style - when she looks at a page she reflects herself
and sees herself in that product -- how does this skirt fit my style - no its
too boring - turn the page - its gap - i have too many denims - turn the page
- should i change my hair color to red - it looks good on her but i dont have
that matching beret that highlights her hair - should i buy it -- and so on

the magazine is a mirror that transforms her into her glamorous self - when 5
glamorous girls go out for a girls night out each of them will look the same
on a superficial level at a first glance - this is so because according to the
strict rules of girl groups every girl must fit the group - she is horrified
of 2 things - wearing the exact same thing as another girl or being totally
out of synch with what everyone else is wearing -

during the 3 hours that she spent to style herself for the social dynamics of
this occasion she expended a tremendous amount of dialectical reasoning to
decide how to differentiate herself within the given constraints - she dwarfed
the entire accumulation of western philosophy in her powers of analysis to
decide how much of her erogenous zones she must expose - the variables she
needs to consider to find the right balance that would make her the center of
attention of her group are close to infinite so there is no need to list them
here

why is she thinking so hard - she must conform to the style dictated to her by
the fashion industry for that season but she must also differentiate herself
within her social network by building on her signature style

to a naive outsider -probably a male- all 5 girls having fun will look the
same - wearing the same color and the same hip stuff - but as seen by each
other the differentiation points will be obvious

you can easily tell how a girl differentiated herself for the occasion -
because as soon as her friend meets her she will acknowledge her friends
efforts to differentiate herself by pointing at it -i love your beret where
did you buy it-

so fashion industry and the modern consumer-girl living in it is a complex
ecosystem that we as outsiders cannot hope to fathom by looking at advertising
and content in the pages of a girl magazine - its all marketing to her - and
the fashion industry knows how to market to her

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Ardit20
I think the problem might be that google has completely ignored advertising. I
do not think it has changed much in the past perhaps five years, much less
than search. They looking to copy facebook, or twitter, or everything else and
to tell me what I want to eat, but focus on their core products which is
search and advertising.

So, there is a real opportunity for someone to come up with a much better
algorithm than Google's in regard to targeting ads. But then, if you do not
have much inventory, you can not really target, and a website owner would
rather have an untargeted ad than nothing.

So I think the problem of targeted advertising is quite complex. For example,
link adsense are targeted well, images not so well because perhaps they are
more expensive to make and thus there isn't much of an inventory. Why would an
advertiser, but the very few, design an image ad when a one hour to set up
link ad might work just as well or better.

In any event, people like an image advert when they see it the first time,
they might the second, maybe third, but soon they bored of it and start hating
it. So changing the ads often is important too.

I suppose, to conclude, the issue is much more complex than simply saying that
the problem is targeting the ads due to the many variables - which the ad
network or publisher can or can not control - that go into targeting the ads
well. That might perhaps be why there is not much progress in this area. The
internet has basically just copied the model from the traditional world and
tried to automate it.

It is an undervalued area though. Not many other things could make one a
billionaire on par with google than solving the advertising problem.

