Why Online Advertising is Failing
Simply put: online advertising is its own worst enemy.
It is useful to drive “Brand Awareness” and increase or support “Share of Mind” but what were those two fancy expressions defined for in the first place?
Sell.
Online advertising doesn’t sell. It takes people their time so they can experience the creativity of a campaign instead of bringing them immediate value. And that’s the problem: the relationship with an online ad usually starts with the wrong foot.
Online advertising is its own worst enemy. It is founded on old, crumbly principles of another age – when the only and best way to promote a product and build a brand was to tell as many people about it, as quickly as possible. The process was simple: the brand pours millions of dollars in a media campaign, puts its product in front of as many eye-balls as possible and keeps its fingers crossed. Then another brand comes in and basically does the same thing but with more money. It can work – but it most often non longer does.
However we put it, online advertising is not sustainable and as we learned the hard way during the past few months, what is not sustainable simply doesn’t work.
My point: if companies want to keep selling their products and services online or sell more of them, they need to stop focusing so much on media and start thinking about service.
Service can take many shapes as long as it provides the audience with clear, immediate and tangible added value: relevance, personalization (of the experience), select online access (special content), recommendations on products and services, involvement or invitations to local initiatives…all the things that allow someone to save time and limit the amount of “work” required when accessing a website.
