Hate Advertising? Get over it.

Categories: Web Advertising, Word of MouthPosted on July 16th, 2007

I was a speaker at Ad:Tech in SF earlier this year and I’m sick of hearing my Social Media colleagues (who I still respect greatly) complain about why they hate advertising: “It’s intrusive, it’s nasty, it looks horrible, it doesn’t work”

Get over it, it’s not going away
See Social Media folks are marketers at heart, they are conversationalists, communicators, and community advocates. We believe that we can be a better society by getting rid of the blasting of messages from the ivory towers. The funny thing is, on many of these folks websites, I see them have banner advertisements or ad units promoting the next conference they go to –ironic.

Much of the internet’s revenue is from Ads
As I understand it, 85% of Google’s revenue in the past has been from online advertising. Contextual Ad sense is Advertising, sure it’s not the annoying “punch a monkey” type of advertising, but it’s still advertising. I predict Google will start to do this with video in the near future, it’s certainly not going away. Read my predictions about Google and Online Video.

We hate shotguns
Advertising is a shotgun approach, and sadly that means that innocents are subjected to the chaff. Advertising messages are often (or should be) targeted at a specific group or demographic, when we’re subjected to advertising that’s not aimed at us, we often don’t like it or try to screen it out.

We love lasers
When Advertising is focused and hits the right target, not unlike a laser, it hits home and resonates. Advertising becomes part of our culture, and people start to talk about (that’s a conversation) from Budd-wise-er, to Got Milk. We hate advertising when its not for us, but in the rare times that it’s on the mark, it resonates with us, and becomes part of us. This can apply for text ads, mobile, ads, and most importantly, contextual ads.

Even though we don’t like it, advertising works
Advertising works. In business school, we were taught that 11-13 impressions of a brand (often advertising) will cause the prospect to be highly likely to try or purchase the product. This is a deep rooted human, psychological, and sociological instinct that’s difficult to ignore.

The Future
Is it possible for products to be adopted by people without word-of-mouth networks? Absolutely. Is it possible for both to co-exist? Advertising online will become more targated, the advanced media buyers will shift to sponosorships, and technology will allow us to triangulate data online, and using mobile devices like never seen before. If done right, there will be more lasers than shotguns.

Online Advertising will evolve, as will word of mouth, conversations, and communities too. Let’s evolve with it.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 6:27 am and is filed under Web Advertising, Word of Mouth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

It definitely works in my household. People use a DVR to skip through ads. In my household my kids use it so that they can pause and rewind ads so they show me toys they want me to buy. I also like to watch clever TV ads over and over again.

There’s also a word-of-mouth thing to this. A week ago while driving by the Countrywide building in Concord, my eldest, sitting in the back seat, said “Countrywide — low-cost refi.” He has no idea what a low-cost refi is, but he associated it with Countrywide and he said it to the one making mortgage decisions in the household — me.

Two weeks ago when we were in the triple-digits he suggested that we get a Sun-Setter for the backyard. “It gives you shade in 30 seconds and if you go online it’s zero dollars down.”

My 5-year-old makes ne call Sleep Train at bed time to get him a “ticket to a better night’s sleep.”

Posted by Lisa on July 16th, 2007 at 8:51 am

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Posted by Daily links - 16.07.2007 : TrendPlex on July 16th, 2007 at 1:06 pm

i totally agree with this. i just wrote about the necessity of a marketing approach that integrates exposure and engagement strategies. vs. pitting them against each other to see which one works better. they work better together. (this is the post: http://social-creature.com/the-myths-of-social-engagement-2)

Posted by jenks on July 18th, 2007 at 6:40 pm

[...] Jeremiah Owyang says we have to get used to advertising and get over ourselves if we think it can go away. Funnily enough, if Google gets search to work much better than it is, advertising will surely decrease since the search results will always get us what we want. For me and for the blogs over the next few months, what I’ll go for is plain sidebar ads but as well as that I’m going have sponsorship for the blogs too. It’ll be way more work to get sponsorship but I think I’d rather have happy subscribers and well-treated new visitors than try any sleight of hand tricks for short term gain while losing long term readers. [...]

Posted by Damien Mulley » Blog Archive » The Vulgarities of web ads - Why Internet Marketing/Advertising still sucks in 2007 on September 24th, 2007 at 4:36 am

I did get over it - with Adblock Plus. Instead of complaining about how much I hate ads, I just block 100% of them.

Posted by hoq on May 12th, 2008 at 4:55 am

Online advertising is not a problem since you can block it. To some extent at least.

However, the problem is that there are countries like mine where advertising is literaly everywhere.

In the streets, on the sidewalks, people push flyers at you all the times, billboards, bigscreens, even god damn scaffoldings have been turned into huge billboards.

And now, our national railway carried decided to seel advertising space on the back of the seets right in front of you. Imagine an 8-hour journey in such a car…

Posted by nauczyciel on June 25th, 2008 at 3:43 pm

Advertising makes people want to be something. The people of my country cannot get past these images and get lost trying to find themselves. They’re busy worrying about sticking to the ideals of these pre-determined personas that they can’t solve the new problems that our generation is introduced to every year.