Intrusion is a totally dead model.
I’m a web designer/developer, not an advertising expert. But I can pretend to be one on my blog.
I agree with this excerpt on the value of advertising:
ad impressions aren’t as valuable online—for every ad dollar that a print reader brings in, an online reader brings in just ten to fifteen cents. That’s due to the nature of the web, which has users actively seeking relevant information, so they can more easily ignore ads—rather than passively consuming them in a newspaper or an hour of television. Meanwhile, the web offers advertisers incredibly rich ways of tracking how well their ads are performing, which means it also provides a truer pricing mechanism for ads. Ads have thus come up wanting; they never were as worthwhile as the ad agencies and management consultants had hoped—and companies know that now.
That article is geared towards journalism and newspaper profit models, but it struck a cord with my experience.
For the small amount of online advertising I’ve been involved with, the clicks just aren’t there. Even when the sites we place ads on have HEAVY traffic.
The blame goes partly to the quote above. People just don’t react to ads. But the other part of it has to do with the quality of the promotions and their relevance to each particular audience. The success of google’s “contextually relevant” adwords program is all the proof you need for the “relevance” argument.
Aside from whatever value you place on “impressions” and people just “seeing” ads, ie: “brand awareness” , online advertising returns are usually pretty disappointing. And I’d argue that newspaper ads would register just-as-disappointing results too, if somehow we had access to newspaper analytics just like we do with web analytics.
Do I know what I’m talking about? No.
However, if I was sitting on a pile of advertising money, I wouldn’t sink it all into ads. I’d invest a good portion of that money into content creation, into storytelling, into providing relevant information to people who are actively seeking it.
What consumers want is information, not advertising. This is something that Google seems to have figured out, likely by accident. Search isn’t successful only because it is relevant. It is successful because it offers information. That information just happens to come to us from an advertiser.
Taking “information” a bit further, what people also respond to are stories.
We’re now in an opt-in culture. The only way to get (positive) attention is to create great media—desired content that is relevant, informing, entertaining and on-brand. Having a brand interrupt a narrative won’t work anymore, whether that narrative is a TV show or a website. The intruding message will be TiVo-ed out of existence, clicked away from, put in the junk folder and ignored. Intrusion is a totally dead model.
I agree, and I’ll even throw nearly all product placement into the “ineffective” bucket; but can you point me to a brand you feel is doing it right? I’m extremely wary when I’m reading sponsored content even when it’s charitable (the only example that’s coming to mind…http://www.helpthehoneybees.com/). I keep thinking, “This seems nice, but what’s in it for them?”
Great article which I agree with completely. I had this discussion last week in regards to a client wanting to have customers sign up for an e-mail newsletter. Basically I said the customer is only going to give you their e-mail address if you give them something free and highly relevant in return.
It reminds me of sales folks hitting me up fifteen years ago to put viewbooks and recruiting videos on CD-ROMs to mail out to prospective students. My feeling then was that it was better to put that same time and monetary investment into the Web site itself.
The irony, though, is that some folks/departments wouldn’t hesitate to pay for something external, but the idea of hiring (even freelancers as opposed to full time staff) to contribute to something “internal” like a college Web site isn’t as acceptable.
(How many colleges have Web designer positions without Web content developer positions?)
Even online advertising efforts such as targeted, keyword based pay-per-click search engine advertising can have returns, but the return on effort in terms of time is still questionable, imho.
As you mentioned, the same effort focused on other approaches (including those you outlined and a host of others) seems like it would yield more results.
For the sake of argument, though, I would argue that intrusion does work, when relevant. Once you’ve put the effort into storytelling, etc., on your Web site, it is tough to beat an “intrusive” e-mail to drive traffic to that story. Such e-mails should be opt-in and relevant, of course, not completely intrusive.