Yesterday’s Washington Post article “Why is digital advertising so lousy?” reminds me of my friend’s dog Pipon who peed on the carpet very proudly and repeatedly, even when we kept saying "bad dog".
The post article's author Frederic Filloux correctly identified two reasons for the bad digital ads that is impacting the future of advertising: #1- poor ad design; #2- badly sold, badly bought.
However there is a big #3-ad relevancy. The digital advertisers still think like the print ad salesmen when it comes to ad targeting. Traditional print ads put little effort on ad relevancy because the print magazines go out to readers in a non real-time fashion. And the ads would stay there for weeks, and even months like a billboard. Ads being contextually relevant to what people were reading was not a requirement. In that old world, brand ads were pretty effective, but not much more than that. For this reason, very few retailers and non-brand manufacturers would place ads in popular media outlets such as Time or BusinessWeek.
However, the digital media has changed how we interact with content. We browse and search on a website or on a mobile device – where our interaction with the content is a two-way street. In this non-static world, readers will not tolerate irrelevancy – much like how we behave in the real-world. If I am having a conversation on French Open Tennis with someone (via the web), showing me a Viking Cooktop in the middle of this is annoying, even I had just spent hours researching a new Viking Cooktop two days ago!
Ads have to Contextually Relevant Right Now. Google Search Ads figured that out and made a company that is worth $150 billion. The media industry must adopt the same principle for display ads, or die.
The post article's author Frederic Filloux correctly identified two reasons for the bad digital ads that is impacting the future of advertising: #1- poor ad design; #2- badly sold, badly bought.
However there is a big #3-ad relevancy. The digital advertisers still think like the print ad salesmen when it comes to ad targeting. Traditional print ads put little effort on ad relevancy because the print magazines go out to readers in a non real-time fashion. And the ads would stay there for weeks, and even months like a billboard. Ads being contextually relevant to what people were reading was not a requirement. In that old world, brand ads were pretty effective, but not much more than that. For this reason, very few retailers and non-brand manufacturers would place ads in popular media outlets such as Time or BusinessWeek.
However, the digital media has changed how we interact with content. We browse and search on a website or on a mobile device – where our interaction with the content is a two-way street. In this non-static world, readers will not tolerate irrelevancy – much like how we behave in the real-world. If I am having a conversation on French Open Tennis with someone (via the web), showing me a Viking Cooktop in the middle of this is annoying, even I had just spent hours researching a new Viking Cooktop two days ago!
Ads have to Contextually Relevant Right Now. Google Search Ads figured that out and made a company that is worth $150 billion. The media industry must adopt the same principle for display ads, or die.
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