You are viewing an old revision of this post, from August 1, 2010 @ 22:46:23. See below for differences between this version and the current revision.
Marketers are following you around on the Internet. They don’t know your name but they know what you do, what you buy, where you buy it, what you’re interested in, and more. The sites you visit collect this information on behalf of networks that then roll you up with other like-minded people in packages, as if you were a subprime mortgage, and sell your eyeballs to advertisers.
People inside the Web industry generally know all this and take it for granted. People outside mostly don’t. That explains some of the wide variation in reaction to a big package the Wall Street Journal published Saturday that chronicles how advertisers track users online.
I found it fascinating that two of the smarter Web veterans I know — Jeff Jarvis and Doc Searls — arrived at opposite perspectives on the Journal coverage. How did that happen? Let’s climb what I’ll call the ladder of reaction to this story, and we can see.
At the bottom rung, we have a simple everyday reader’s freakout. OMG They’re spying on us! This, it seems to me, is the level at which the Journal’s coverage was pitched. It’s full of loaded language: References to “surveillance.” A headline that refers to “your secrets.” References to “surveillance” and “surreptitious” practices. Repeated use of the phrase “sophisticated software” to describe run-of-the-mill stuff that we’ve lived with for years, like the cookie files invented at the dawn of the Web by Lou Montulli (and that anyone can easily delete from their browser).
On the next rung up the ladder we have what I predict will be the response of the punditocracy, the editorial page writers and columnists. They will weigh in early this week, shake their heads in disapproval and demand that the government step in and pile more privacy regulations on the Internet advertising industry.
This will drive the Web industry insiders — up on the ladder’s third rung — even crazier than the Journal feature itself did. For them, the activities the Journal describes are simply old news. This is where we find Jeff Jarvis, who described the Journal feature as “the Reefer Madness of the digital age”: “I don’t understand how the Journal could be so breathlessly naive, unsophisticated, and anachronistic about the basics of the modern media business.” Similarly, Terry Heaton found the Journal’s coverage biased and behind the curve: “It’s like somebody at the paper had been sleeping for ten years and woke up to discover it’s the year 2010!”
Insiders will worry that an anti-tracking backlash might throttle the Web advertising industry at just the moment when big media institutions are praying that online ad revenue might help them make up for all the ad income they’re losing in their offline businesses.
Even more important, they will argue that tracking isn’t an invasion of privacy at all, since the advertisers mostly don’t know you by name or personal identity. Instead, they see you as a bundle of demographic traits and acquisitive tendencies. We owe the maintenance of this important distinction to an ad-tracking scare of a previous era, the great DoubleClick/Abacus controversy of 1999. Yes, this issue has been with us since 1999, which does make you wonder about the Journal’s breathless tone today.
The most important argument the insiders make is the very simple one that tracking, done right, actually performs a useful service: It helps reduce your exposure to ads you don’t care about and shows you more ads that you actually want to see.
This brings us up high to rung number four, where we meet Doc Searls, who is sitting on his own little platform that he’s built over the years, and inviting us to sit down with him and listen.
And he’s saying to the Web insiders: You guys are missing two points. The first is that “most real people are creeped out by this stuff,” even if it is old hat to you. The second is that you aren’t thinking big enough if you think that tracking users’ behavior is the best the Web can do.
You think the Web is all about making inefficient advertising more efficient, when it’s really about eliminating advertising as we have known it entirely, by giving us “better ways for demand and supply to meet — ways that don’t involve tracking or the guesswork called advertising.”
Searls has been elaborating this argument from the early days of the Cluetrain Manifesto to his current work at Project VRM. He’s saying: We know ourselves and our needs better than any third party’s guesswork. The Internet can enable us to speak directly to the marketplace about what we want. We can have a direct conversation with vendors of the things we are thinking about purchasing:
if I had exposed every possible action in my life this past week, including every word I wrote, every click I made, everything I ate and smelled and heard and looked at, the guesswork engine has not been built that can tell any seller the next thing I’ll actually want… Meanwhile I have money ready to spend on about eight things, right now, that I’d be glad to let the right sellers know, provided that information is confined to my relationship with those sellers, and that it doesn’t feed into anybody’s guesswork mill.
I find Searls’ vision appealing, even as I recognize the disruption it portends. The end of advertising also means the end of the business of delivering eyeballs to advertisers. It means that creative people and journalists and other “content creators” will need to abandon the old media’s compromised triangle trade (with creators ferrying consumers to advertisers) and learn how to fill public needs directly. That means we’ll need new ways to fund public-good information (foreign news, accountability journalism, investigations) once we can no longer pay for it with the overflow from advertising-monopoly profits.
That’s the future. Today, I actually think the Journal is doing a public service by writing about stuff industry insiders already know about — even if the paper went over the top in its intimations of dark marketing conspiracies. But it would be so much more of a service to look beyond the desperate thrashings of the badly wounded ad industry — and toward the better model that is struggling to be born.
Post Revisions:
- August 2, 2010 @ 11:03:06 [Current Revision] by Scott Rosenberg
- August 1, 2010 @ 22:46:23 by Scott Rosenberg
Changes:
| August 1, 2010 @ 22:46:23 | Current Revision | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Content | |||
| Unchanged: <a href="http:// www.flickr.com/ photos/sifter/ 282602167/"><img src="http://www.wordyard.com/ wp-content/uploads/2010/08/ 282602167_38fcf51b3a_m.jpg" alt="" title="Eyeballs" width="240" height="196" class="alignright size-full wp-image-2596" /></a>Marketers are following you around on the Internet. They don't know your name but they know what you do, what you buy, where you buy it, what you're interested in, and more. The sites you visit collect this information on behalf of networks that then roll you up with other like-minded people in packages, as if you were a subprime mortgage, and sell your eyeballs to advertisers. | Unchanged: <a href="http:// www.flickr.com/ photos/sifter/ 282602167/"><img src="http://www.wordyard.com/ wp-content/uploads/2010/08/ 282602167_38fcf51b3a_m.jpg" alt="" title="Eyeballs" width="240" height="196" class="alignright size-full wp-image-2596" /></a>Marketers are following you around on the Internet. They don't know your name but they know what you do, what you buy, where you buy it, what you're interested in, and more. The sites you visit collect this information on behalf of networks that then roll you up with other like-minded people in packages, as if you were a subprime mortgage, and sell your eyeballs to advertisers. | ||
| Unchanged: People inside the Web industry generally know all this and take it for granted. People outside mostly don't. That explains some of the wide variation in reaction to <a href="http:// online.wsj.com/ public/page/ 0_0_WZ_0_0448.html">a big package the Wall Street Journal published Saturday</a> that chronicles how advertisers track users online. | Unchanged: People inside the Web industry generally know all this and take it for granted. People outside mostly don't. That explains some of the wide variation in reaction to <a href="http:// online.wsj.com/ public/page/ 0_0_WZ_0_0448.html">a big package the Wall Street Journal published Saturday</a> that chronicles how advertisers track users online. | ||
| Unchanged: I found it fascinating that two of the smarter Web veterans I know -- Jeff Jarvis and Doc Searls -- arrived at opposite perspectives on the Journal coverage. How did that happen? Let's climb what I'll call the ladder of reaction to this story, and we can see. | Unchanged: I found it fascinating that two of the smarter Web veterans I know -- Jeff Jarvis and Doc Searls -- arrived at opposite perspectives on the Journal coverage. How did that happen? Let's climb what I'll call the ladder of reaction to this story, and we can see. | ||
| Deleted: At the bottom rung, we have a simple everyday reader's freakout. <i>OMG They're spying on us!</i> This, it seems to me, is the level at which the Journal's coverage was pitched. It's full of loaded language: | Added: At the bottom rung, we have a simple everyday reader's freakout. <i>OMG They're spying on us!</i> This, it seems to me, is the level at which the Journal's coverage was pitched. It's full of loaded language: A headline that refers to "your secrets." References to "surveillance" and "surreptitious" practices. Repeated use of the phrase "sophisticated software" to describe run-of-the-mill stuff that we've lived with for years, like the cookie files invented at the dawn of the Web by Lou Montulli (and that anyone can easily delete from their browser). | ||
| Unchanged: On the next rung up the ladder we have what I predict will be the response of the punditocracy, the editorial page writers and columnists. They will weigh in early this week, shake their heads in disapproval and demand that the government step in and pile more privacy regulations on the Internet advertising industry. | Unchanged: On the next rung up the ladder we have what I predict will be the response of the punditocracy, the editorial page writers and columnists. They will weigh in early this week, shake their heads in disapproval and demand that the government step in and pile more privacy regulations on the Internet advertising industry. | ||
| Unchanged: This will drive the Web industry insiders -- up on the ladder's third rung -- even crazier than the Journal feature itself did. For them, the activities the Journal describes are simply old news. This is where we find Jeff Jarvis, who described the Journal feature as <a href="http:// www.buzzmachine.com/2010/ 07/31/cookie- madness/">"the Reefer Madness of the digital age"</a>: "I don’t understand how the Journal could be so breathlessly naive, unsophisticated, and anachronistic about the basics of the modern media business." Similarly, <a href="http:// www.thepomoblog.com/index.php/ a-biased-attack-on-cookie- based-advertising/">Terry Heaton</a> found the Journal's coverage biased and behind the curve: "It's like somebody at the paper had been sleeping for ten years and woke up to discover it’s the year 2010!" | Unchanged: This will drive the Web industry insiders -- up on the ladder's third rung -- even crazier than the Journal feature itself did. For them, the activities the Journal describes are simply old news. This is where we find Jeff Jarvis, who described the Journal feature as <a href="http:// www.buzzmachine.com/2010/ 07/31/cookie- madness/">"the Reefer Madness of the digital age"</a>: "I don’t understand how the Journal could be so breathlessly naive, unsophisticated, and anachronistic about the basics of the modern media business." Similarly, <a href="http:// www.thepomoblog.com/index.php/ a-biased-attack-on-cookie- based-advertising/">Terry Heaton</a> found the Journal's coverage biased and behind the curve: "It's like somebody at the paper had been sleeping for ten years and woke up to discover it’s the year 2010!" | ||
| Unchanged: Insiders will worry that an anti-tracking backlash might throttle the Web advertising industry at just the moment when big media institutions are praying that online ad revenue might help them make up for all the ad income they're losing in their offline businesses. | Unchanged: Insiders will worry that an anti-tracking backlash might throttle the Web advertising industry at just the moment when big media institutions are praying that online ad revenue might help them make up for all the ad income they're losing in their offline businesses. | ||
| Unchanged: Even more important, they will argue that tracking isn't an invasion of privacy at all, since the advertisers mostly don't know you by name or personal identity. Instead, they see you as a bundle of demographic traits and acquisitive tendencies. We owe the maintenance of this important distinction to an ad-tracking scare of a previous era, the <a href="http:// news.cnet.com/ 2100-1023-233413.html">great DoubleClick/Abacus controversy of 1999</a>. Yes, this issue has been with us since 1999, which does make you wonder about the Journal's breathless tone today. | Unchanged: Even more important, they will argue that tracking isn't an invasion of privacy at all, since the advertisers mostly don't know you by name or personal identity. Instead, they see you as a bundle of demographic traits and acquisitive tendencies. We owe the maintenance of this important distinction to an ad-tracking scare of a previous era, the <a href="http:// news.cnet.com/ 2100-1023-233413.html">great DoubleClick/Abacus controversy of 1999</a>. Yes, this issue has been with us since 1999, which does make you wonder about the Journal's breathless tone today. | ||
| Unchanged: The most important argument the insiders make is the very simple one that tracking, done right, actually performs a useful service: It helps reduce your exposure to ads you don't care about and shows you more ads that you actually want to see. | Unchanged: The most important argument the insiders make is the very simple one that tracking, done right, actually performs a useful service: It helps reduce your exposure to ads you don't care about and shows you more ads that you actually want to see. | ||
| Unchanged: This brings us up high to rung number four, where we meet Doc Searls, who is sitting on his own little platform that he's built over the years, and inviting us to sit down with him and listen. | Unchanged: This brings us up high to rung number four, where we meet Doc Searls, who is sitting on his own little platform that he's built over the years, and inviting us to sit down with him and listen. | ||
| Unchanged: And he's saying to the Web insiders: You guys are missing two points. The first is that "most real people are creeped out by this stuff," even if it is old hat to you. The second is that you aren't thinking big enough if you think that tracking users' behavior is the best the Web can do. | Unchanged: And he's saying to the Web insiders: You guys are missing two points. The first is that "most real people are creeped out by this stuff," even if it is old hat to you. The second is that you aren't thinking big enough if you think that tracking users' behavior is the best the Web can do. | ||
| Unchanged: <b>You think the Web is all about making inefficient advertising more efficient, when it's really about eliminating advertising as we have known it entirely</b>, by giving us "better ways for demand and supply to meet — ways that don’t involve tracking or the guesswork called advertising." | Unchanged: <b>You think the Web is all about making inefficient advertising more efficient, when it's really about eliminating advertising as we have known it entirely</b>, by giving us "better ways for demand and supply to meet — ways that don’t involve tracking or the guesswork called advertising." | ||
| Unchanged: Searls has been elaborating this argument from the early days of <a href="http:// cluetrain.com/">the Cluetrain Manifesto</a> to his current work at <a href="http:// cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/ Main_Page">Project VRM</a>. He's saying: We know ourselves and our needs better than any third party's guesswork. The Internet can enable us to speak directly to the marketplace about what we want. We can have a direct conversation with vendors of the things we are thinking about purchasing: | Unchanged: Searls has been elaborating this argument from the early days of <a href="http:// cluetrain.com/">the Cluetrain Manifesto</a> to his current work at <a href="http:// cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/ Main_Page">Project VRM</a>. He's saying: We know ourselves and our needs better than any third party's guesswork. The Internet can enable us to speak directly to the marketplace about what we want. We can have a direct conversation with vendors of the things we are thinking about purchasing: | ||
| Unchanged: <blockquote>if I had exposed every possible action in my life this past week, including every word I wrote, every click I made, everything I ate and smelled and heard and looked at, the guesswork engine has not been built that can tell any seller the next thing I’ll actually want... Meanwhile I have money ready to spend on about eight things, right now, that I’d be glad to let the right sellers know, provided that information is confined to my relationship with those sellers, and that it doesn’t feed into anybody’s guesswork mill. </blockquote> | Unchanged: <blockquote>if I had exposed every possible action in my life this past week, including every word I wrote, every click I made, everything I ate and smelled and heard and looked at, the guesswork engine has not been built that can tell any seller the next thing I’ll actually want... Meanwhile I have money ready to spend on about eight things, right now, that I’d be glad to let the right sellers know, provided that information is confined to my relationship with those sellers, and that it doesn’t feed into anybody’s guesswork mill. </blockquote> | ||
| Unchanged: I find Searls' vision appealing, even as I recognize the disruption it portends. The end of advertising also means the end of the business of delivering eyeballs to advertisers. It means that creative people and journalists and other "content creators" will need to abandon the old media's compromised triangle trade (with creators ferrying consumers to advertisers) and learn how to fill public needs directly. That means we'll need new ways to fund public-good information (foreign news, accountability journalism, investigations) once we can no longer pay for it with the overflow from advertising-monopoly profits. | Unchanged: I find Searls' vision appealing, even as I recognize the disruption it portends. The end of advertising also means the end of the business of delivering eyeballs to advertisers. It means that creative people and journalists and other "content creators" will need to abandon the old media's compromised triangle trade (with creators ferrying consumers to advertisers) and learn how to fill public needs directly. That means we'll need new ways to fund public-good information (foreign news, accountability journalism, investigations) once we can no longer pay for it with the overflow from advertising-monopoly profits. | ||
| Unchanged: That's the future. Today, I actually think the Journal is doing a public service by writing about stuff industry insiders already know about -- even if the paper went over the top in its intimations of dark marketing conspiracies. But it would be so much more of a service to look beyond the desperate thrashings of the badly wounded ad industry -- and toward the better model that is struggling to be born. | Unchanged: That's the future. Today, I actually think the Journal is doing a public service by writing about stuff industry insiders already know about -- even if the paper went over the top in its intimations of dark marketing conspiracies. But it would be so much more of a service to look beyond the desperate thrashings of the badly wounded ad industry -- and toward the better model that is struggling to be born. | ||
Note: Spaces may be added to comparison text to allow better line wrapping.
Here’s the unspoken truth about all of this data tracking stuff: in my experience, 80% of ad buyers don’t even know how to read their own Google Analytics, let alone anything more sophisticated.
I know a lot about this stuff, and that’s why I’m not paranoid. Most marketers are still pretty unsophisticated about the web.
There’s a sidestep off the third level: I find it suspect that the Journal is suddenly deciding to attack the online ad business just as it surrenders ad growth in favor of pay walls. Not that I’m a conspiracy theorist….
Thanks, Scott.
Of course I’m flattered to be on your fourth rung, and I’m pleased that you understand and approve of what I’ve been saying (and working on).
I should add that I don’t expect advertising to go away, and that what we’re working on (in the VRM community, anyway) isn’t intended to blow up advertising. It is intended, however, to bring customers and sellers together in new ways that reduce or eliminate much of today’s guesswork. And that includes advertising, which is a very popular form of guesswork.
The hard thing for many of us to realize is how normative advertising on the Web has become, and how much we depend on the continued running of the guesswork mills. But the commercial Web as we know it is only about fifteen years old. It’s still new. Advertising isn’t a tree that grows to the sky, and neither is Google. (Though, as I said in The Data Bubble — http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2010/07/31/the-data-bubble/ — Google is well positioned to facilitate and benefit from new relationships between buyers and sellers.)
By the way, we have a workshop coming up late this month at Harvard called VRM+CRM 2010. It’s free, and anybody interested in helping work on these new tools is invited. Details and registration here: http://vrmcrm2010.eventbrite.com/
I find all the hype about “the end of advertising” just that. Hype. Fiction. Foolishness.
You can believe all you want about “a more efficient marketplace,” but at the end of the day people make purchases because they’ve identified it as something they like and they trust/like the seller.
That’s called branding.
And for branding to work, it takes advertising.
It’s pure wishful thinking that basic human nature about making buying decisions will ever change.
For the most part, the people who promote these fantasy notions live inside of an Internet bubble where they never deal with real businesses or make real business decisions, nor do they deal with average consumers. They think everybody thinks just like they and their friends think.
For those of us in the real world, we see advertising still working and see no evidence that it will ever stop working, and so long as it works, businesses will want to buy advertising, and they will buy it where they have confidence that there is a good fit between the eyeballs a content producer provides and the business they want to develop. And the more confidence the advertisers have, the more they will pay.
The big issue facing the Internet isn’t the ability to deliver results, it’s A) publishers pursuing incorrect advertising models; B) and too many ill informed people spreading the noxious falsehood that online advertising doesn’t work.
And, BTW, if you’re a local publisher and your ad model relies on targeted advertising, you’re got the wrong ad strategy.
I knew about data-mining by marketers/advertisers. But until it started showing up on various pages while I browsed, I didn’t realize how relatively primitive and ineffective it was. Mostly I am offered opportunities to buy exactly what I just bought. How many trailer hitches does one man need?
Howard, I think the full phrase was “advertising as we have known it” – rather than simply the end of advertising. To take just one example: right now, branding on TV is still very effective, and branding through social media pales by comparison – but it’s foolish to think the relative strengths of each will always be the same.
I like to think that the highest rung up the ladder that Scott describes is about consumer empowerment, and the way new technology and services can harness consumer demand to put people on equal footing with massive marketing systems.
It’s amazing how often the traditional media outlets that rely on advertising as a primary supporter of their programming run “Advertising is evil” type stories.
Advertising it just paid communications. And now a message from our sponsors is really all it is. If any media outlets truly believed the sensationalism they are screaming they would have done away with their own ad models long ago.
The reality is that content is expensive. People don’t want to pay for it. Brands are willing to pay for your content in exchange for 30 seconds or a bunch of pixels.
And by the way, this story is going to get much juicier with the introduction of the cross platform social cookie.
We are watching you. Keep walking and look straight ahead . . . . .
Howard Owens totally misses the point about branding, it absolutely DOES NOT solely require advertising. It requires strategic PR and reputation management way more than any old school marketing to the masses in an obsolete static format that used to be spoon to a captive audience. The Internet is the antithesis of a captive market and so all the old rules are moot. I think this is the most telling statement of the whole article:
“You think the Web is all about making inefficient advertising more efficient, when it’s really about eliminating advertising as we have known it entirely, by giving us “better ways for demand and supply to meet — ways that don’t involve tracking or the guesswork called advertising.”
I haven’s clicked on or payed attention to an online ad in many years and I dont even use ad block. Like many I dont need to and my personal brain filters are so skilled nothing but TRUE branding gets through. But then I am a PR guy and have my biases. I cant wait to see the death of conventional advertising. Maybe then the remnants of the industry will have to work outside their stale old box to get people to notice with something creative.
Howard Owens totally misses the point about branding, it absolutely DOES NOT solely require advertising. It requires strategic PR and reputation management way more than any old school marketing to the masses in an obsolete static format that used to be spoon to a captive audience. The Internet is the antithesis of a captive market and so all the old rules are moot. I think this is the most telling statement of the whole article:
“You think the Web is all about making inefficient advertising more efficient, when it’s really about eliminating advertising as we have known it entirely, by giving us “better ways for demand and supply to meet — ways that don’t involve tracking or the guesswork called advertising.”
I haven’s clicked on or payed attention to an online ad in many years and I dont even use ad block. Like many I dont need to and my personal brain filters are so skilled nothing but TRUE branding gets through. But then I am a PR guy and have my biases. I cant wait to see the death of conventional advertising. Maybe then the remnants of the industry will have to work outside their stale old box to get people to notice with something creative.
I agree with the position that advertising is dead. I think Jeff Jarvis made the point in a Columbia lecture that the remote actually killed advertising. It just took about 40 years for the death to fully set in. The fact of the matter is, advertising only delivers limited value to consumers/customers. It informs, but very much from a company or brand-centric perspective. Several cultural and behavioral changes have made this very shaky value exchange irrelevant.
1) The demise of linear information and entertainment content distribution and consumption. When you’re no longer hostage to the paid magazine, newspaper or TV schedule crammed with 30-second spots to get your information, news, sports or entertainment and you can in fact get your content anytime and anywhere, most of it free, most of it ad-free, you choose that option every time. We HATE interruptions and that all an ad is, an interruption. When we have technologies and tools to avoid it, we choose them over the meaningless pitches for stuff we don’t want.
2)The demise of the sanctioned, professional class of producers and publishers who acted as the arbiters of what was worthy content as well as their media-owning slave lords. As the tools and technology of production and publication have become cheap or free and the means of distribution the same, we’re all producers and publishers now.
3) The empowering of the mass. The crowd has always acted as the filter of the popular and in many cases the good and it still does. But, there’s more democracy in content now than ever before. Because the cost of entry has been eliminated, we now can discover all kinds of new talent and information sources. We trust what individuals say more than faceless, nameless institutions…corporations, churches, governments, educational systems…the list goes one but as Clay Shirky points out in his excellent “Here Comes Everybody”, our new found ability to connect and converse with one another in new kinds of social groups represents a tremendous threat to the status quo…and that includes business and advertising. t
Personally, I think the future for brands and companies that want to communicate with their audience is to stop using the web as yet another channel for irrelevant push, interruption-based marketing and instead harness these tools of democratized content creation and distribution and start creating communications and forms of information and entertainment that actually adds value to their customers lives. Listen to what your consumers and customers are saying. Look at what they’re searching for. Provide the information your customers seek. Answer their questions. And do this without trying to pitch your stuff all the time. In doing so, you’ll surprise and delight a lot of potential customers, who will be grateful for your help and that gratitude will turn into transactions as they begin to trust you. That’s the one thing advertising and sales pitches cannot do…build trust. Everyone knows you have something to gain, so what you say is suspect from the start.
The problem is, there’s such a well entrenched symbiotic relationship between marketer, agency and media company it will take a while for these bonds, forged on the back of lavish entertainment, celebrity and trips to the Super Bowl to dissolve. But, when they do, when the majority of companies figure out they can be just as good at creating content as the media companies to which they were formerly beholden, they’ll abandon both them and the ad guys and start making really informative or interesting stuff…or maybe even entertaining stuff, like Old Spice did recently with Old Spice Guy…videos which have been viewed by over 110 million people to date and lifted sales by 107%. This is the future for marketers. Content, not ads.
I simply can’t believe the number of folks who keep saying that Advertising is dead, which really gets away from the real point of the article, so I’ll get back to that. The real crux of the article is how behavioral, demographic and geo tracking has impacted marketing for quite some time now. It’s nothing new, and it has indeed fundamentally changed the way we as marketers can reach our target audience.
But I will dive into the digression about the “Death of Advertising.” Even if your definition of advertising is so limited that it includes only the traditional 30-second spot, your assertion is still not true. I believe the advent of the remote, the DVR and Premium Online content has altered the effectiveness and use of the traditional 30-second spot, but it hasn’t been killed by a long-shot. You might think I’m crazy, but even when I DVR a program, I occasionally stop to watch an ad, and I’m not the only one.
Scott Cone sites the Old Spice campaign, so let’s take a deeper look at that.. If you’ll recall, the Old Spice man was a 30-second spot long before it was a viral success. Part of the reason it reached the critical mass that it did was because of the continued relevance of the big-buy 30-second spot and, indeed, the “Holy” Super Bowl Ad. What Old Spice and Toyota have done extremely well of late is tie the traditional ad to online content. In my opinion, that’s a big takeaway. In other words, Old Spice reinforced their traditional buy and placement with a great, full-content online presence that worked in concert with one another.
Advertising and Marketing may have changed as we have known it, but it’s not unrecognizable.