This article originally appeared in Wally Bock's Briefing Memo newsletter in 1999.
"I know how to reach people in advertising on television, I don't know how to do it on the Web. No one does yet." -- marketing executive from a major packaged goods company.
WALLY'S COMMENT ... That one's just true enough to be dangerous. In fact, we're still learning about how to use the Web for advertising and marketing. It's rather like the early days of radio and television.
Years ago I saw an amazing kinescope of an ad being presented over a local TV station sometime in the early 1950's.
It was a newspaper advertisement mounted on a board that was being held so the camera could zero in on the picture that was a part of the ad. At times you could see the fingers of the person holding the board while a voice off camera read the copy from the newspaper ad.
What's the point? The point is that when a new medium comes along, we tend to try to use it based on models that we know work in older media. When TV started to sprout antennas all over the homes of America, the advertising which was done on it wasn't TV advertising as we came to know it. Instead it was a hodge podge of radio ads with pictures and newspaper ads with sound. It isn't until the late 1950's and early 1960's that you begin to see television ads as we now think of them. Those ads used entertainment and high-production values to deliver a message.
I've written about this elsewhere in an article on using the adoption of TV to predict the adoption of the web.
The Web as we now know it, and as at least part of it is likely to be for the foreseeable future, is a functional information-based medium. That seems to me to indicate that any effective advertising that works there will have to be functional and information based in order to be effective. I believe, for example, that the reason that click through rates have been falling through the floor is that people are discovering that clicking on a banner ad breaks up the information flow and changes the functional experience.
Clearly this is an over-simplified view of a form of business art that will develop its own techniques in the years ahead. But, consider using content-based ads as part of whatever you do in your advertising and marketing efforts online.
This article originally appeared in Wally Bock's Briefing Memo newsletter in 1999. As I reviewed it in 2001, the basic points still looked good to me. They still do on last review in 2003.
Even with all the rich media I'm seeing, information is still the core medium of of the web. That means that effective advertising on the web needs to acknowledge that and then ride the horse in the direction it's going.
Created/Revised/Reviewed: 2/15/03
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