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By Paul DeBraccio
Do we trash traditional media and reallocate all ad dollars to digital?
Do we trash Web site ads and move to social media?
Do we move from traditional social media (aka Facebook, et al.) and start to tweet ads?
How does the perennial explosion of mobile fit in?
Is TV dead? We will only watch TV on computers?
Are books dead and do we Kindle and find ways to sponsor a book?
How many magazines will die until we agree that that industry has stabilized?
Depending on how many ad and digital trade papers, magazines and (oh my!) Web sites you read, all of the above questions can be easily answered—so say the experts.
Some tout Integrated buying or selling as the be all to end all, and individual media may just as well fold up and walk away.
Social media—I was the VP sales of both Geocities and Tripod in the ’90s and found that most advertisers loved our offerings of home pages based on vertical categories until it came to IO time. They would then ask to not have their ads run anywhere near consumer-generated content. Some ad category marketing directors continue this philosophy to this day, although the frequency has decreased somewhat.
I went to a pharmaceutical conference a few months ago at which most speakers pointed out their desire to embrace social media sites and not to fear it. This was great until a few days later, when the agencies asked my staff that we try not to run their ads near consumer-generated content.
These two incidents were almost 10 years apart and yet they seem uncannily similar. For all the growth and press and valuations given to social media (and now Twitter), the industry is still hesitant to completely embrace social media.
So where does this leave us?
I attended Adtech SF recently, and my observation is that we seem to have traveled very, very far to get back home. Booth after booth touted “ad targeting to increase revenue for you and me,” “search engine optimization to increase revenue for you and me,” “ad networks with targeting to increase revenue for you and me.”
It was literally a blizzard of undifferentiated booths using the same adjectives and in some cases the same colors.
One company stood out with its simplicity—www.flypaper.com. Their booth had plain orange and blue walls and no hyperboles decorating them. They simply had their logo and thus the motivation for customers to stop by to inquire or watch a demo. They provide an excellent Flash content management platform that simplifies Flash creation. Their message was direct and easy to understand.
Amid the malaise and rhetoric of the show, it struck me that maybe that is what marketers need to do. Keep it simple. Agencies and publishers are scrambling to find the holy grail of the digital era while amassing arsenals of social, mobile, video, rich media, targeting, Twittering, Kindling and all the rest.
Perhaps we should delineate the real reasons for these tools and use them for their primary reasons and not get pulled into the hurricane this new technology and new ways to view old media.
When I was a media planner we were taught that each media had strengths and subsequent weaknesses and they were to be used like various colors of a palette to help to achieve the overall marketing and advertising objectives. Most of all we had to defend the use of these tools in the annual advertising plan presentation. If your rationale for using a media could not stand up to the basic objectives of the campaign you were told to remove them.
It seems that the ad industry may be better off addressing the specific attributes of all the shiny new tools on the horizon and see how they will help to achieve basic, old advertising objectives. The tools will come and go, but reaching the consumer and breaking through clutter will be here forever.
Paul DeBraccio is CEO of Interevco.
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