

The Golden Age of Internet Marketing? - kcurtin
http://blog.aweissman.com/2011/11/golden-age-of-internet-marketing.html

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brainyprod
Long time lurker here, finally got an account to comment on this item.

I agree with Andrew's take on the new advertising paradigms, but I can't agree
with his premise that display advertising on the Internet does not work. It
works, and not only that, in some cases it works brilliantly. Not to say that
it works for every audience (like HNers), or every product for that matter.

His point about low CTR is accurate but not entirely relevant. The user who
asked in the comments "What is the CTR of the magazine ads?" hit the nail on
the head. It's not always about CTR, but also brand impressions, reach and
frequency.

Case in point: I did a campaign for a new brand in another country, which
included display advertising. CTR was low, and initial conversions were low
too. But over time, many would search for the brand after the visit, returning
to the page and they converted! In so many other campaigns I would combine
display with social media, email marketing and other stuff and get great
results. Yes, I said email marketing. That still works too, and with some
audiences, it is literally reeling them in. (No, I'm not talking about spam).

In short, Andrew is writing with an either/or mentality with advertising, when
one needs to be thinking of and'ing: of all the tools available, which ones
are going to work best together? Take a layered approach. Display advertising
may be a hammer, but not every problem is a screw.

~~~
jonnathanson
Andrew's thesis is very interesting, but he's a little too quick to throw out
various babies with their bathwater. Take his dismissal of psychological
approaches to advertising, for instance. Why? Why are sociology and psychology
no longer relevant? Maybe they're irrelevant in the old-school, Don
Draperesque sense of their use (i.e., people sitting around in a boardroom and
telling narratives about What People Want, and so forth). But then again, no
one's done advertising or marketing like that in 50-odd years.

Psychology is as relevant to digital advertising as it ever was in analog
advertising, and it'll be _massively_ more important in social advertising.
Understanding how the human mind works, why it chooses what it chooses, and
how people are influenced and, in turn, influence others -- these things are
still the bedrock of advertising. Media types may rise and fall, but the human
brain is still the human brain. Group behavior is still group behavior.
Psychology and sociology will be increasingly important tools in the
marketer's arsenal as we move into the media of the future.

It's not an either/or proposition between psychological theory and real-time
data analysis. Savvy marketers should combine the two. Both have their place.
(As you've pointed out, the piece tends toward too many "either/or"
implications that needn't be).

~~~
stfu
Weissman needs to differentiate more. He seems to be mixing up marketing,
advertising and sales. I would argue that "people sitting around in a
boardroom and telling narratives about What People Want, and so forth)" are
still core to successful advertising.

At the core of advertising is the "idea" - almost similar to a startup.
Neither number crunching nor some psychological tricks are able to replace
this. In fact their purpose is in my opinion just to evaluate or optimize
towards better follow up investments.

Now this might be a different story when talking about (direct)sales where you
can try to quantify action-reactions related to a specific product. And for
most businesses the role of marketing ("all processes for creating,
communicating, delivering, and exchanging value") is far more complex than
just Tweets, Facebook and Foursquare.

~~~
aweissman
I mixed those concepts up purposely in order to make the larger point which is
that we may be on the cusp of native monetization schemes - ones that are
consistent with how users use web services

~~~
jonnathanson
_"...we may be on the cusp of native monetization schemes - ones that are
consistent with how users use web services..."_

Perhaps, but that doesn't negate the strategic fundamentals of either
marketing, advertising, or sales. The emergence of breakthrough tactics --
even disruptive tactics -- does not necessarily upend strategy. In some cases,
it simply allows the marketer (or advertiser) to pursue his/her strategy more
effectively.

"The product sells itself" is, to some extent, a misperception. Even in the
coming state of things. No product ever truly sells itself -- even if it _is_
found in search, or recommended by a friend, or stumbled upon. The art and
science of building, distributing, pricing, and positioning that product -- so
that is _is_ recommended by the right people to the right people, stumbled
upon under the right circumstances, or searched for in the right context --
still draws upon all the knowledge built up in the marketing field to date.

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imjk
While I agree with the author's conclusion that better integrated "ad" units
like StubleUpon's Paid Discovery, and Twitter's Promoted Tweets will become
both more prevalent and affective, his premise that contextual ads don't work
is just false. He's also also wrong in thinking that these more integrated ads
are entirely new concepts, divergent from old media such as television,
cinema, magazines, and periodicals.

The truth is that integrated advertising on these new social web services is
just catching up to what has long been standard in traditional media. For
example, in TV and cinema, product placements by brands have been an effective
alternative or supplement to standard commercials. In the same way, magazine
and periodicals have long accepted "advertorials" by staff writers that
passively mention/promote specific brands/views along with their traditional
page layout ads.

While he's correct to think that these more integrated types of ads will be
more affective on the web as they're more "consistent with the way their
services natively work," it's something that traditional media advertisers
have known for a long time.

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aweissman
i dont think traditional media advertisers have applied these principles to
web ads; thus my conclusion that display doesnt work. New products - maybe
even some that I mentioned - will work better

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tsunamifury
I think the more obvious and less 'revolutionary' way of stating his point is
that ads that focused on awareness (i.e. i wasn't looking for information
about this but you are telling me anyways) are dying in the face of ads that
focus on conversion (i.e. I was looking for this and your ad helped me find it
and buy it).

This isn't a radical change or even the end of advertising, its just more
efficient.

~~~
aweissman
Agreed - i didnt say this was a revolution, perhaps I shoukd have instead
stated this was evolutionary

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eykanal
There seem to be two points to this article; (1) CTR is a terrible metric for
ad effectiveness, and (2) the web is an extremely rich medium for displaying
ads, and there's still potential that has yet to be discovered. I'm not sure
why the author combined those points in a single thought, but they're both
valid, and (I think) very true.

~~~
aweissman
I combined them because I thought they were related, e.g., low CTR is evidence
that we need better ads

