A Fall in Online Advertising is Just a Reflection of Economy and not A Call on Online Advertising Itself
Yesterday I happened to read a guest post on Techcrunch by Eric clemons, a qualified professor in matters of operations and information management. It was also tweeted and bookmarked quite a bit if Tweetbook is to be believed. In a very descriptive post he placed his views on the current online advertising scenario and concluded that online advertising as we know it is bound to fold up.
A majority of his views seemed to be based on the premise that people just don’t like or trust advertising and it interrupts what they are looking for. He explains that online advertising doesn’t work because it impedes the way people use the web and therefore doesn’t derive the expected result of advertising. This therefore leads to online advertising not working and hence the dwindling revenues for publishers.
I have my reservations however in accepting this view.
One of the facets of digital advertising is it is measurable, while we have debated before on whether it has impacted negatively for digital media, one thing we can’t deny is that it is an important aspect. What it does is it provides information on how an advertisement performs. We know how many sales or leads are being generated on a certain site and it’s performance relative to the traffic it generates. In times better than todays falling sales meant non performing ad copies or landing page content, or perhaps a failed product.
However, even with the best ad, a truly innovative product sales might not happen in today’s times, simply because the demand has dipped. The demand again has dipped not because people have lost interest, but they can’t afford spending. So the interest remains while the spending power has reduced. It suggests a scenario where people click on ads but don’t end up buying a product. Essentially a money sucking campaign. What’s the easiest thing to say and do at such a point of time – online ads are not working, let’s cut our budget on that end.
This is the reason advertising revenues are falling. Changing times require change in objectives and not change in the way of work. Publishers who used to earn in tens of millions till some time last year couldn’t have earned it if online ads didn’t work, and it can’t suddenly stop working either.
Though I do agree with one point in part with Clemons.
He suggests that as a different medium, the web will need to find its own way of generating revenue different from that of television and print. Just the way television and print found a way different from sports and events prior to them.
With the advent of tools like Facebook and Twitter, this is a notion I agree with. They are fundamentally different from other web publishers around because they are an environment themselves. In such scenario advertising can work only if it remains within the environment, which isn’t the case now. Such environments will need to find their own way of monetizations different from online ads elsewhere. But for the others it is just a matter of waiting for demand to egg back.
I have a feeling that the people who agree with Clemon’s hypothesis do so by looking at the way a lot of seemingly interactive ads behave. In the name of rich media and interaction a lot of these ads just turn out to be time and bandwidth suckers without providing any value to the viewer or for the advertiser therefore. A point that I often repeat at my office is about the fact that everyone is online for information either about oneself, someone else or something that is beneficial for them to know. Often web users are aware of the information they seek, at other times they just have a vague idea, that’s the reason search engines are so popular. For instance I just have an idea that I need some information on audio tools for my car, a specific idea would have been I need kenwood speakers. This is where online advertising comes in. I am not talking about contextual advertising, but about providing specific information.
Ads need to direct and speed up access to information, to that extent even a good usable web design is part of online advertising. And for as long as people browse, online advertising will exist as well, hale and hearty.
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Interesting content.
Just wanted to share some information that I came across in a few articles discussing about recession and how we can adopt a different marketing strategy to promote our business. It’s quite eminent that most of the advertisers and businesses are taking to online advertising medium since the Internet has now become a necessity to reach global audience. However, even today there is still a huge chunk of people who do not access Internet and to reach this segment of the society; we can rely on the print media. This in fact would be a great choice for anyone whether they are looking out for global, national or local exposure.
Since the economies are now at the bring of recession, it’s a good idea to consider print media as well in the marketing mix so that you can extend your reach further to get additional traffic to your website or business. You can try a blend of online and print advertising through a reputed ad agency that can help you professionally.