Let the web be about branding. It’s time.

The power of branding: ‘I drive a Cadillac. I have arrived.”

By Rebecca Harris

In its earlier days, the web was a great boon to direct response marketers, offering the ability to target ads at low cost with measurable results.

All these years later, it is still.

Therein lies the problem. The web has not grown much beyond direct response advertising. It’s all about impressions, clicks and return on investment-getting that sale, right now, today.

The internet could be and should be so much more, as a low-cost, highly effective medium for building brands, which is really what great advertising is about.

The web is the ultimate visual medium. We should be getting great, imaginative creative, the art of advertising at its best. What we are getting is Instant Polaroids.

This DR mindset in which everything is focused on immediate return has a lot of downsides.

For one, it sets unrealistic expectations of user behavior.

The web experience is largely passive, like reading a magazine or watching TV. It is unrealistic to expect the consumer to see an ad and suddenly change course, drop what he or she is reading or watching, to order the product.

Further, by treating the medium as a commodity in which all ad impressions are equal, the DR mindset drives down the price of inventory to the lowest value and encourages the flooding of the market with yet more cheap inventory.

It leads to more and more ad clutter. No wonder the fretting over the sudden rise in ad blockers. If enough consumers adopt them, it could hurt everyone—advertisers and publishers.

It encourages cheating. If you’re selling inventory for next to nothing, why not give them nothing in return in the form of ads that were never served? The price for that: $19 billion a year and growing.

The internet will always be a direct response medium, but now it’s time to take it to the next stage, turning it into a branding platform as well.

It just makes so much sense.

Branding is about recall-claiming space in the consumer’s mind so that when faced with a barrage of options, your product is the one they reach for.

Price is the driver in direct response. Quality is the driver in branding, the perception that your product is worth it regardless of price.

It defines that consumer’s identity. I’m a Cadillac kind of guy. I wear Brooks Bros., period. Prada is me. I subscribe to Martha Stewart Living. I live the Martha Stewart life.

But most important, good branding drives sales.

Proof is in the pudding. Look at the great brands out there. They are all top-sellers, year in, year out, weathering consumer fads and knockoffs.

How do we turn the web into a branding platform?

For the answers, we need only look to the great magazines. Of all media, magazines have always been tops in brand-building, and it’s not hard to understand why.

Look to the design, the way pages are laid out, the full-page ads, the total absence of clutter. The eye is brought into the page and held captive.

Everyone gains, the reader, the advertiser, and the magazine.

The reader gets quality content, without the clutter. The advertiser reaches its target consumer in an optimal environment, without worries of click fraud. The publisher can fetch top dollars for that ad space.

With all its technological wizardry, the internet can do an even grander job of it.

It’s time.

Rebecca Harris is a writer, a former media director at Turner in Atlanta, and a consultant with Brand Cottage.

Tags: new media, online, commentary, direct response, rebecca harris