Digital advertising. Where did it all go wrong?

If consumers had access to Ad Blockers on their Televisions decades ago would a subset not have blocked TVCs too?

Well put.

@MIke C I agree with you. Consumers have the choice nowadays. Previously they didn’t. Take magazines as an example. The first 6 pages can often be adverts. (It is why I do not buy magazines.)

2015:
I can follow people, companies, things that I like on social networks and get info from the horses mouth.

‘Where did it go all right’, don’t you mean?
– Slowly a correction is occurring. Getting rammed McDonald’s, Coca Cola and other awful companies’ messages is unethical, annoying and doesn’t help our society.

It isn’t wrong that a large multi national cannot push it’s anti-society agenda. It is a good thing. ‘Purpose’ is what it is all about today. If your brand can change the world, people will love it and flock to it like Christians to Jesus.

A great read and whole heartedly agree. Having worked in digital ad sales for a long long time it never ceases to amaze me the brands that judge success on clicks and measure every morsal of a digital campaign just because they can. Yet it’s completely fine to accept the millions of dollars TV receives but can’t be measured because they think it works and have always done it.

I thought there were adblockers for TV ages ago….. called ‘Remotes’. And yet some people did not bother to avoid the ads. Weirdly they sat glued watching shiney messages they could relate to, listening to jingles that repulsed them whilst singing along inside their heads…..

Had TV ads been the size of most web ad formats, overlaid on your TV screen across the content you wanted, then advertising would not have taken off in the first place.

Thankfully we’re coming full circle and video is becoming the prime activity for people online, so we can get back to decent advertising content. Can we please leave out the jungles this time around!!

Let’s look at some other forms of direct marketing that supposedly gets the phone ringing: email marketing (anti-spam laws got introduced), telemarketing (do not call register), direct mail (no junk mail signs or it goes straight in the recycling). Similar to Mike C’s comment, people would use ad-blockers on TV if they could. It’s one of the reasons more people move to digital viewing content – where there are no of fewer ads.

Brand marketing helps create awareness of a brand, but if you’re not present when a consumer is actually in market for the products or services you sell, those brand marketing dollars go to waste.

To get the most out of digital marketing brands should be looking to implement an integrated strategy that involves a combination of brand marketing, prospecting/direct response, remarketing and life cycle/retention marketing. This can also involve a combination of such activities offline as well.

One of the biggest errors in digital over the years has been the focus purely on last click, and a siloed view of digital channels, where brand activity is never going to have the ROI of programmatic/direct response, which in turn won’t have the ROI of search.

It would not be an uncommon situation that a consumer would potentially see a brand ad on their favourite news site, later be searching for products in Google to see that the brand they saw earlier actually stocks those, so they click to the site. However, 98-99% of the time, that person will leave without purchasing. They then may get retargeted, and return to the site through SEO, and sign up for an email newsletter. Which comes with a $20 off voucher which they then use to make a purchase.

The last click view would give total credit for that purchase to email. However, without the investment in brand, search, retargeting and SEO, the consumer may never have come to the site or signed up for the email in the first place – yet those channels get no credit.

Having an effective attribution tool that allows a company to see the impact that each channel has on the other can really help a brand to understand the true impact their individual digital channels are having, and attribute value accordingly. This way you can most effectively invest in channels that are driving the initial brand engagement, and those which help to push people through the buying journey to purchase – whether that be online or in store.

Since when is brand advertising the only way to build a brand? The fastest growing brands today rely on product and experience to build brand. When they deliver excellence, it’s their customers telling their brand story, not advertising. That’s how you build a brand online today.

“If your brand can change the world, people will love it and flock to it like Christians to Jesus.”

No, they won’t. Most people lie and will happily buy the cheapest product, environmental or other issues be damned.

This is a very interesting article.

I can’t help but feel that EVERYONE is confused and no-one know what direction to take. It kind of like the Matrix “where not sure who struck first, the humans or the machines” in this case it’s “the client or the agency”.
Everyone appears convinced that traditional “advertising is dead” but so is digital advertising, no one wants it!!

So what happens when GFC V2 hits? (which it will sooner rather than later). No-one will have any money, consumers or clients and brand building has become a thing of the past in favour of story telling and trying to create a following.

I can see a lot of scrambling, panic and brands (backed by huge VC dollars) folding.

I wish I had 57 minutes spare to watch the George Best Video, but I’ve already had a pub lunch.

I really like the George Best reference as it’s quite apt. Especially given that his reason for quitting football was that he’d become disillusioned with the game.

I feel the same way sometimes, especially when I see “digital” being treated as a box ticking exercise or somewhere to attribute a smaller budget as it’s simply easier to buy an audience and then report back on clicks and impressions whilst forgetting that advertising’s main job job is to get people to spend time with the brand.

If you are going to do that then you need to be thinking about the experience you provide your customers first and then think about how you might communicate that to them.

Like George Best, the correct measures of success are not being focused on. We need to start moving the goal posts before the game is up.

There are now a number of TV ad blockers in market – their names are Presto, Stan, and Netflix.
Excellent article though

TV vs Digital: Cold vs hot. Lean back vs lean forward. We keep forgetting not all media is used or consumed in the same way.

@comment #8.

May I refer you to comment #7

thanks – I read the entire article

Chiming in from the States here.

I think the issue isn’t so much the use of tech but how well (or badly) it is used. The hammer can’t be blamed for bad carpentry. Ad tech is a tool which I believe has great potential if well used. If every ad I saw was relevant to something I need right now, I would be far less likely to block it, whether by use of the remote control when watching the telly or ad blocking software online.

That having been said, I agree with your perspective on traditional, untargeted ads. As Henry Ford said, if I asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse. Global warming aside, the point is that as Steve Jobs said, people don’t necessarily know what they want until advertising tells them, thus generating demand.

Fashion is one of the few print ad markets that thrives. I believe this is in part due to the perceived ad expense syndrome you describe–in effect, the glossy ad in exclusive magazines is part of the product experience; the stuff that dreams are made of.

In US pharma advertising to healthcare professionals, premium online inventory is very slow to adopt ad tech. I suspect this is the case with many other BTB publishers.

Its a shame really

This is a story about the accountant v,s the creative and unfortunately is these times of conservative austerity and the ability to measure so called response the accountants have been on top.

Time to re-balance marketing industry as this is our future we are talking about here.

Does the US population look to ad block during the superbowl???????

Is the next Qantas campaign going to slip by without a wide range of commentary and concern from the broad Australian population.

What would a more effective political campaign look like in Australia if it wasn’t so nasty and negative?

The accountants have one single tool that our industry has let them use to beat marketers into bland and now online oblivion. Numbers. Numbers can be measured. And you know what they say. If it cant be measured it cant be managed.

Those accountants are managing marketers into irrelevance.

Now they have robots doing the numbers instead of media buyers.

I remember those days in the 90s when agency and marketing folk would say we need to get to the executive table to argue how effective our marketing is so we can argue for a larger pie.

Well look what happened. You got to the table and you got beaten by the numbers man. Hes the one at the end of the table with a blue tie and spreadsheet.

Eaon has done a fair job in describing where we are at although I don’t think the George Best analogy is all that helpful. It makes the ad industry look like its looking back to days of the past glory and all of that lost opportunity when really there was a lot of lost opportunity as a result of our own actions often whilst on the juice.

This is an argument the marketing industry is going to have with the CFO and financial analysts about why they (the numbers guys)won the battle and lost the war.

in this new low growth environment where robots can do the planning according to the numbers it will be those that are creatives that can come up with the campaign killer that will demonstrate that at the end of the marketing supply chain are people that buy things with money that can be measured.

Time to change the conversation to what we as an industry do best and that is to create emotional messages that connect with consumers that want to spend their hard earned on that you create because it makes them feel better. Thats a conversation that the numbers guy in a blue tie wont understand until he sees the sales numbers that he can measure but he will see them.

Now whos up for that conversation?????

The article is spot on (once again).

The issue isn’t the use of adblockers, the issue is the use of incredibly shit advertising formats which do nothing but encourage horrible advertising.

I don’t care how much info you know about me, how much you track me, whether you know I pour milk before the cornflakes, if your ad is shit, I’ll ignore it. Just like I do when I flick quickly through magazines and newspapers, or fast forward through ads.

Fix the advertising, find an idea, give the punter something worth watching/reading and we might get through this mess. But there is no holy grail, no wonderful way to avoid having talent or skill, we can’t automate or force feed brands into the hearts and minds of people – and we should know, because we’re people.

Faaaark… this is great. About to share widely.
One of your best Pritchard.

Thanks for the comments and debate everyone.
Extra special thanks to the commenters who actually read the article.

There appears to be a complete disconnect between ad tech and consumer behavior.

Here’s an example: At 2pm one day our washing machine finally spun its last cycle. I went online to look at product reviews for a comparable machine and narrowed down 2 options. Then visited 2 retailer sites and compared best prices and found the nearest stores and visited both that afternoon. I mentioned the online prices and both gave me a better deal instore than online. I arranged the delivery and received it at 9am the next morning. Less than 24 hours from first search to delivery.

My online search had captured heaps of information about my preferences and for the next 6 weeks (!!!) The Good Guys bombarded me with ads and supposedly hot prices inviting me to purchase online now!

I’m sure someone in an agency somewhere was proudly presenting the success figures of their latest search campaign to a client who was incredibly impressed. The truth is that by the time their online campaign started to kick in I had long ago purchased it from a Good Guys store at a far better price.

It seems to me that consumers are using online to purchase quicker whilst agencies are still in the sand pit playing with their latest bright new shiny ad tech toys making promises to clients that are completely ridiculous!

George Best was British, not Irish.

@Ann Onimous I doubt Best would have identified as British. Although technically you are correct. I am Scottish, and therefore also British.

No question this is a memorable and incredibly considered piece – thank you Eaon.

I suspect the culture in media agencies though to be one of often taking the path of least resistance plus those internal trading desks need to keep printing the money between the inventory bought for the client at a low price and the agency margin(s) added to this.

These elements alone minimise developing a culture of pioneering and I’m sure stifle most folk who may think in this way. Unless there’s a true shift to leading with a big idea comprisiing of decent ad creative and native done well, most attempts most commonly bolted on as an after thought will continue to be vanilla and yield unremarkable results.

It seems to me that all the media agencies now are just pushing clients towards their trading desks, and it’s all just for the sake of the margin they get. There’s no thought put into it, and agencies can no longer work directly with publishers to think outside of another bloody m-rec that follows people around based on what they have clicked or searched a week ago. Ever recommendation with a digital component comes back with a trading desk element.

Great article and yes, I read it all… AND the comments. Eaon I think you were spot on with your very first line and even more so with these three words…”the current obsession”. I firmly believe the industry has indeed strayed from the path of advertising righteousness with its “current obsession”… but more than that, it actually does this repeatedly in what could be described as a blind race towards the latest shiny thing in advertising, whatever that may be… Cast your mind back (if you’re old enough) to:

– 1999/2000 building insanely complex massive websites for clients for $300k+, but conveniently ignoring the fact there was insufficient web traffic to merit the investment, no Google to find it (ok, so there were directories) and a pathetic $5k online media investment you begged the offline buyers for.

2005/6/7/8/9 etc The Year of Mobile… and see above re stupid investments

– 2007 to 2015 It’s ALL about social… (so forget mobile) and Adland gets suckered into (arguably) the largest advertising con in history by paying large sums to build Facebook communities they could then reach for “free” only to see FB screw down the organic reach to almost nothing and force you to pay to reach them all over again…

– 2012 to 2015 now its all about Programmatic… an obsession which has led to the data driven obsession

2014 to 20?? Let’s all build massive content hubs focusing on the inspired insight that consumers will flock to read 600 pages of content on getting grass stains out of jeans (don’t ask).. and then head over to read 50 pages on dandruff..all before breakfast. If you aggregate all of the content now being produced by companies at huge expense (ok.. I know it doesn’t have to be that way…)

My point being NOT that any of these “obsessions” above were not predicated on the introduction of new tech or ways to connect… BUT that the industry over-invests time, energy, budgets… at the expense of what we already know works. The baby has been thrown out with the bathwater on so many occasions we should be locked up for child abuse.

Perhaps the reason we seem to be not much better (perhaps we are worse?) than we were 30 years ago in selling products for our clients, is that we have failed as an industry to learn, iterate and improve. Maybe instead of always chasing the shiny new thing and forgetting that TV (for most audiences) still moves the dial more than any other medium (fact), that mass marketing still drives brands because it drives scale quickly (which hyper targeted niche digital does not do), that story telling is what really engages consumers… maybe then we will claw back some of the ground we have lost with clients.

Me, consumer, points and says “What Darren said!”