Papers’ Web Hopes Dim a Bit
The Web is changing the whole nature of marketing. The visual and imagistic is in decline; the useful and functional is on the rise. Google is the biggest brand in the world. It makes most of its revenue from advertising, and yet it has never sold a visual ad–only text ads.
Even with the growth in broadband, the simple text search ad is on the rise. The Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2007:
Underlining this pressure is a shift under way within Internet advertising. The ad formats that have so far proved strongest for newspapers — banner ads, pop-ups and listings — are losing ground to formats such as search marketing. Ad buyers say automotive, entertainment, financial-services and travel companies — all major newspaper advertisers in print and online — are aggressively shifting dollars into search marketing.
Bob Johnson says:
Added on April 26th, 2007 at 1:24 amFor an interesting read on the inability of the advertising world to break from traditional ad formats, try “Life After the 30-Second Spot” by Joseph Jaffe. Despite the title, the focus is on all forms of traditional advertising. The theme fits right in with this post. And the change, of course, isnt’ just from ad format… its also message content. Traditional advertising relies on (supposedly) clever creative to push out messages and saturate media. It just doesn’t work anymore and the ongoing collapse threatens the entire traditional agency model. Continued rejection of marketing hype combined with relentless pressure for effective measurement will hasten the decline and fall.