Publishing 2.0: who’s afraid of online advertising?
Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 writes in Who’s afraid of online advertising?
A new McKinsey & Co. report called How Companies Are Marketing Online draws the astonishing conclusion that many advertisers are reluctant to shift dollars online — despite the massive shift of consumer attention online — because of the “absence of meaningful metrics and adequate capabilities.”
I know. This is sequel number what to this movie? So I made the following comments.
Point 1: people, alone and in groups, make decisions based on faith, not reason. No surprise that they stick with what they know, what has succeeded for them in the past, what presents no risk to them losing their job for advocating something new. The person who stands up and wants to do things differently gets the target on their back.
Point 2: marketers want mass audiences but mass audiences are fast becoming as rare as hens teeth. Why mass audiences? Because then marketing is a system. Design the system and then adjust it as needed. We already have the mass system—get a bunch of people and pound them as hard as you can with the same message.
But the web doesn’t conform. Given choices, people gather in smaller groups. They form social bonds or reinforce existing ones. They recommend things to each other, reflecting and tailoring to that individuality they always had. Mass media has lost its ability to focus those individuals into mass audiences at the same time as people have discovered they can do media for themselves.
So a new advertising system is needed to fit a web architecture, and that new system is emeging slowly in small pieces, loosely joined (Weinberger). Which makes a lot of people uncomfortable, even afraid.
So who’s afraid of online advertising? Everyone already in advertising, and all the companies making their living off those people.
I may have had AdHack on my mind just a little as I made the comments.
