Myths of the internet: Instant gratification

By the editors of Media Life

Digital advertising is poised to pass TV as the biggest advertising medium over the coming two years. But there are still a lot of misconceptions about internet advertising. Media Life will take a look at each one in our five-part series, “Myths of the internet.” Below is part three of the series. Click here for part one, “The worth of click-throughs,” and part two,  “Gewgaws and gizmos.”

Longtime Media Life readers will surely remember the First Great Period of Atonement. That came after the internet crash of 2001. Web companies, most contrite, confessed that they had oversold advertisers on the value of the click and vowed never to do it again.

Some even vowed to stop sending click reports to advertisers entirely.

Their reasoning was in part practical. First, click rates had tumbled as the gee-whizziness of the web wore off. It just didn’t make any sense to continue hawking the value of a commodity—clicks- that were rapidly in decline.

But the other motivation was more principled. It was far-sighted.

That was the insight that while the future of web was not yet known, it certainly held a lot more potential than click-generation.

Those early visionaries saw the internet as an amazing platform for a wide range of uses. As an advertising vehicle, they saw its potential to be a branding medium equal to magazines, and magazines were considered the ultimate branding medium.

Advertisers could use the web to build their brands, and at far less cost than print magazines. They could be even far more targeted. Plus the internet came with the tools to gauge how well campaigns were actually doing.

It made so much sense.

But alas, this was not to be. So much for grand ideas. The click roared back as the measure of all things internet.

This has led us to the Second Great Period of Atonement.

And what a mess we have on our hands.

The web is awash with dreadful content and worse ideas, all posted to generate views of anonymous audiences publishers can then peddle to advertisers.

We have all sorts of names for this wretched stuff, most containing the word “click,” as in “click bait.”

Most of the advertising is no less wretched, befitting the content, cookie-cutter tripe that blinks and pops with the apparent singular intent of annoying the user.

It’s no surprise then that more and more users are adopting ad blocking software to cut through it all.

Click fraud is rampant, so much so that some advertisers are now moving their ad dollars out of digital and back to television.

The great Golden Goose of media, the internet, is at risk, and some have come to worry that the internet ad model is doomed.

Going forward, the one hope is that the advertising industry and its various trade organizations revisit the lessons learned 15 years ago in the First Great Period of Atonement, and this time to embrace them with real conviction.

The lessons boil down to simple common sense.

For all the promise of web advertising, it’s still advertising. It’s not magic. There is no instant gratification.

Good advertising—real advertising—takes hard work. You have to get the message right, and to get the message right you have to know the brand inside and out.

You have to know the consumer of that product and talk directly to that consumer.

You have to spend time with the campaign. You have to be patient. You have to think beyond the next 10 minutes and the next 10 clicks to what that brand wants to become over the course of a year and longer.

You have to build the brand. That’s what advertising is about. If you are not doing that, it’s not advertising.

Tags: ad model, advertisers, advertising, audience, internet, magazines, marketing, myths of the internet, online, research, tv, web