Scott Karp has a post up on the failure of traditional advertisements online. While worth reading, it makes a common mistake about display ad effectiveness – because we’re not currently measuring how they work, they don’t work.
In reality, all those interruption-based advertisements do have some effect on you, whether you like them or not. This might not translate into immediate action – you’re on the web to do something specific, and the ads are a distraction. But in the second you were distracted, that brand has gotten in your head a little bit. Multiply that by repeat viewings, and you end up with a brand you’re much more likely to come back to later. Online, you might go to a search engine and do a ‘navigational search’ for the company – maybe even clicking on a search engine’s text ad. (Navigational searches are ridiculously common – for more on this, see here.) Offline, you might enter a store you’d usually pass by, try a new product at a store you frequent, or pick the product up off the shelf at the supermarket. None of this is currently measured properly (although Microsoft’s aQuantive is trying.) When it’s measured at all, the navigational search gets all the credit for the effectiveness of the display advertisement.
This is why statements like “Google is the ONLY company that has succeeded in web advertising” and “Traditional advertising formats FAIL on the web” make me cringe a little bit. Simply not so – Google’s done incredibly well, but it gets a lot of undeserved credit for the efforts of many other marketers.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
That’s precisely one of the things we’re trying to do. The fact is that for certain brands (think big financial institutions for instance, or automakers) the point of advertising is not necessarily to generate a sale right then and there, or even a lead — sometimes it’s to build up “brand equity” (for lack of a better term) which, when the time comes for a consumer decision to be made, is important.
And I agree, measuring this is tough. We’ve been dabbling with combinations of:
1) Latent effects of one medium on another (display vs search);
2) timespent in display (defining timespent itself is a ballgame on its own)
3) non-click conversions and correlation b/w frequency of display ad exposure (or interaction) and acquisitions for direct response marketers
etc.
Now if you’ll excuse me I’d like to hijack this comment for a slightly different purpose: do you know of any good ad nets in EU?
Cheers,
b
Bosko -
The one that immediately comes to mind is Adconion. With Specific Media’s purchase of Adviva they’re probably worth a look as well. But I very well could be missing some very major players, and of course those two aren’t going to be uniformly strong across the whole EU.
Cheers,
Greg