Make Digital Marketing Work

The decade is barely a few days old and already the marketing industry is in full swing.  I read yesterday that display advertising is promoting itself with a series of ads designed to court controversy and prove its ability to cut through.

The ads feature controversial slogans such as “Working women make bad mothers”.  Aside from the fact that my own mother was a working woman and still managed to be the best mother in the world ever (and I am prepared to commit an act of violence on anyone who tries to argue with me on this), I can’t help feeling that the campaign isn’t so much proving how display advertising can cut through and provoke discussion as proving that nothing cuts through quite like controversy in any medium.  This was after all the corner stone that tabloid journalism was founded on and the Daily Mail has proved itself to be highly effective for over 100 years.

Advertising has been known to court controversy as well and achieve enormous cut through.  I am reminded of the print ads and window displays used for Benetton in the 80s and 90s and the absolute storm that the All the colours of the World campaign caused in South Africa whilst the company became the fourth largest in Italy.

The difference between great advertising like that and simply making a controversial statement is that Benetton had values.  There are many politicians that court controversy as well but unless they have values that others can admire the controversy tends to engulf them and damage them rather than lifting them to dizzying heights of success.

I therefore can’t help feeling that the display advertising campaign could have done with a bit more planning to actually prove its point but there again, I and many others are writing about it so maybe it has got something going for it.

As much as I think any improvement for display advertising is a good thing, I can’t help feeling that geographical targeting is a bit of a waste of time.  On the one hand you have media that makes time and place irrelevant and then on the other you try and segment the audience based on the things that by nature of the media don’t matter.  It’s something that intrinsically feels wrong to me.  Surely it would be better to serve up ads based on site usage, so that if I started to look at online content about financial products then the online ads would be based on financial products, and if I started to look at geographic content then the ads would be relevant to that area.

Essentially I don’t think that display ads are direct response because they are intrusive.  I’m not saying they are a bad thing because they do have a significant brand awareness role to play as part of an overall media multiplier but in and of themselves I cant help but feel that their role is to establish an ambience of brand around the content rather than demanding a click through.

Does this sound strange to anyone or is that how you view banner ads as well?

I see t all over the place online, and particularly on commercialised blogs.  People have content articles which you start to read when suddenly a hover ad in a style sheet dims the article you are reading and demands that you interact with it, or close the article.  Well guess what, I close the article and I suspect everyone else does as well.

Some of them do at least have a close option on them but others are so badly written (or so determined to get a click and a bit of commission at any cost) that the rest of the site becomes useless and pointless for the visitor.

This kind of advertising isn’t a million miles away from the shop assistant who immediately accosts you and pesters you from the moment you walk into their shop until the moment you get fed up and storm out vowing never to go back.

In both cases there is absolutely no engagement, and the only thing in their eyes is dollar signs.  It is also an attitude that is more likely to actually prevent a sale from happening than pretty much anything else

Any sale is completed by consent from both sides.  These types of site are not destined to produce any real revenue for the owner because the vast majority of visitors will close down and go somewhere else.    As a result any useful content that the site has amassed is completely wasted.

We know that Google’s Adwords work because they give you exactly what you are interested in at exactly the time you are looking for information on it.  Compare that to an Ad that isn’t targeted and won’t go away and interrupts you whilst you are researching something else.  How likely is that ad to succeed?

As a professional I am incredulous that people persist with these tactics and would urge everyone to sit and think about what they were doing.  There is a way to market, advertise and promote yourself online and it works.  Why would you want to pick techniques that didn’t work?

I spent a day at Ad Tech a few weeks ago in the company of one of my favourite New Media Age types.  We wandered around and caught presentations, discussed technologies and generally got a feel for the marketplace as it stands right now.  One of the big buzzes was about Ad Exchanges.  For those that do not know about them, you can read a good description of what an Ad Exchange is and what it does.

What it amounts to is that display ads are suddenly becoming a lot more targetable.  Ad exchanges let you target your ads based on a series of criteria such as geographical location and connection speeds.  The aim is to cut out the number of wasted impressions that are delivered, and only deliver ads to the marketplace that is geographically relevant and content which connection speeds can handle.  The claims being made are that response rates (click through) are increased by 50%.  Now colour me unimpressed but on a lot of sites I’ve seen this would increase click through from 0.02% to 0.03%.  Still not amazing.

Also I am yet to be convinced by media that still charges by the impression instead of the results it produces.  That’s the acid test and the one that I suspect will shut most Ad Exchange and media owners  up.  Are you prepared to charge on a CPC basis, and if you are how does the price you put on it compare to a Google Adword click?

Suddenly I hear silence across the void.  When the media is of suitable quality that media owners feel able to offer it on a CPC basis then we may have something to talk about.

The simple truth is that whilst this is a very good step forward by display advertising it doesn’t alter the fact that the ads themselves are invasive and distracting for users who are actually there to view the content.  The reason Google works is because it gives me an ad for the thing I am looking for at exactly the time I am looking for it.  Do display ads do that?  Are they spliced at the DNA level to the content they accompany?  Most of the time I don’t think so.  Display advertising still is yet to move beyond the realm of brand based advertising.  It isn’t direct response and despite this leap forward with Ad exchanges it isn’t likely to become direct response any time soon.  It will help your email produce better results and your eCRM campaign will love Ad Exchanges as part of a media multiplier but when it comes to getting clicks.  Our advice would be stick with Google.

Some 24 years ago I sat in a call centre taking credit card donations during a rock concert when an Irish chap suddenly announced “fuck the addresses” on primetime television.  The result was that the phone lines exploded.  This proved to me then that TV was a very significant direct response form of media.  The reality though is that largely advertising on TV doesn’t take advantage of this at all, and instead opts for brand building.  I’m not saying that brand building is bad of course and there are agencies in town who are quite simply superb at it.  What I am saying though is that brand building in general doesn’t seem to be flavour of the month with advertisers when they have a choice of putting their money into one of the most effective direct response mechanisms ever invented, in the form search.

Whether it is paid for or natural, search is the dream direct response media.  To my mind this isn’t an argument about whether tv or online is getting more dollars it is an argument about where smart money is going and it seems to be pretty obvious that it is going to direct response.  Given the economic conditions that isn’t surprising (apparently it always happens that way).  It is interesting that TV is having to rethink itself completely.  The ads that agencies dream up for a brand can just as easily find their way onto IP TV or online video ads but the opportunity to create interactive direct response ads for that medium is one that has yet to be properly taken advantage of.

Banner ad spend has suffered despite the increase in online spend and doesn’t give the same return as search.  This has taught us that because something can be clicked on doesn’t mean it will be clicked on.  Surely there can’t be that many people in the world that would claim that banner ads are anything other than brand building these days?

That’s not so say that brand building doesn’t have its place.  We all know that the media multiplier effect is as true online as it is offline.  So that your direct response media works a lot better when you are also running brand building activity.  Whether this is  TV supporting direct mail or banner ads supporting emails the effect is the same and response rates increase.

With the advent of 4OD i Player and the other various web based catch up channels we have an opportunity to rethink how we approach moving picture advertising and how consumers will want to interact with it.  On demand web based catch up TV sites all feature clickable ads but are they getting clicked on and how do they differ from the broadcast counterparts?

I think the opportunity is calling for direct response and brand building to be spliced together in a new format that will find its home in Online TV.  The biggest drawback to this will be if offline agencies (who have the brand building conceptual creatives needed for this), will persist in their view that the message is everything or if they will this time embrace the idea that building a relationship with the customer is their starting point and goal.