Between yesterday and today, I’ve read at least 3 posts/articles that talk about how online advertising is a failure, one of them on TechCrunch yesterday by a guest writer (Eric Clemons), one on the Economist, and another on MediaPost’s online video insider.
The latter focuses only on online video advertising, and it’s quite an interesting read, that raises some clearly valid points that are worth considering by anyone making a foray into online video advertising. I wouldn’t go as far as saying that online video advertising is dying as the writer has done; I think that it’s just still maturing, and needs a bit more time for it to fit in perfectly into the whole online advertising puzzle and get to where everyone wants it to be.
Anyway the first two articles I read just feel like they’re a blast from the past, it’s as if they were pulled out of the archives from back in 2001 after the dot com bubble burst and a bunch of online companies went down in flames.
In fact, it’s as if some people are blaming the woes some online companies are going through now because of the bad economic situation on the fact that online advertising is a failed model. As if everyone is doing perfectly ok, and it’s just internet companies that are having problems.
It strikes me how many people still don’t get it.
You’d think that by now, after all these years, more people would have seen the light and recognized that online advertising, when done right, is the most effective, most targeted, and most measurable form of advertising there ever was.
I mean, no matter how skeptic you are of online advertising, you can’t argue with the power of being able to target an ad at a specific person who perfectly fits the profile of your potential customer, and who is actually interested in what you have to offer, and then measure exactly how effective your campaign was and how much you made out of it.
It’s true that not everyone can rely on online advertising 100% as a revenue model to sustain their business, but that doesn’t make it any less important or effective as a model; all it means is that every internet business has to have its own combination of ways to generate revenue as part of their business model, which holds true for any type of business, not just online ones.
In the end of the day, if a bunch of restaurants fail and shut down, it doesn’t mean the model of selling food to people doesn’t work, it just means that those restaurants did something wrong: either choosing the wrong location, not marketing well, choosing the wrong type of food to serve, providing bad food or bad service or whatever other reason.
