Old ad models are broken… but new ones will break, too
Last month I wrote about the plateau in clicks on Google’s AdWords search ads and wondered if we were reaching saturation for this type of advertising: a point where consumer attention was maxed out, and scarcity of attention (rather than ad dollars or ad space) was going to be the economic dynamic of online advertising. Gerry McGovern at Giraffe Forum raises a similar question in a post called Finding is the new advertising:
Traditional advertising works well in time-rich, money-poor economies. It works less well in today’s money-rich, time-poor economy. There was a time when we were prepared to watch something that might be vaguely interesting.
We watched the car ad even though we didn’t need a car. We watched the chocolate ad even though we had given up chocolate. We watched the ad about diapers even though our children were now teenagers. We even occasionally bought the idea that buying product X made us into better, smarter, sexier people. Sometimes ads were funny. Sometimes they were more entertaining than the programs we were watching.
…
Google, Yahoo, and many other websites survive very well on advertising, but it is a very different form of advertising. When I’m searching to rent a recreation vehicle (RV) in the United States, and I see a list of RV companies in the right hand column of my search results, I don’t see that as advertising. I see it as helpful, useful.
He’s right. But… even when ads are useful, there are still limits on how much time we’ll spend with them, because there are limits on how much time we have to spend on anything.
Sponsored search ads are not quite the nirvana of relevance they ought to be (how often do you look up the name of an old friend and get an ad that says “Bob Smith! Find it at NexTag!”?). And traditional ads aren’t quite the hated thing some say they are - they have, in fact, become a big part of our shared culture.
The lesson here: the new ad model (finding) may be a big improvement over the old model, but even newer, better models have limits. You’re still fighting for attention, you’ve still got to make a worthwhile offer, you’re still got to work to be relevant. And as the new model matures, the next new thing will emerge… with its own limits and life span.
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Indeed.
Getting people to click is only the first step. What will they find when they come to your site? That’s what’s often really broken.
So, I click on a great one-liner ad. Then I get to the site. Whooaaaa. “Where’s the model I want?” “How do I look at a larger image?” “What’s the difference between choice a & b?” “where the heck is the shopping cart?” “How do I call them?” etc. etc. So, I hit the back button and go to a competitor site.
Somehow many think the whole Google ad thing is - poof! - magic. They forget all the other stuff - like making it extremely easy for us to do business with them.