Back Seat Marketers

What’s the quality of an impression? Specifically, I’ve been wondering if there is a meaningful difference between advertising on the web v. advertising on TV/radio. Is our focus different for TV when watching an ad spot versus seeing a banner or sponsored link?

TiVo Effect
The Oscars just aired one of its worst showings and Patrick Goldstein of the LA Times nails the current consumer sentiment on advertising attention:

“The academy should heed his advice. Here’s how we watched the Oscars in my household: We TiVo-ed the broadcast, came back from Little League practice, hopped in bed with some snacks and zapped through the commercials…”

I’m all over DVR’s, too. An hour of broadcast content dialed down to 42 minutes? Yes, please. Netflix for season 1 of Battlestar Galactica is on order, ad free.

Strategically, the TiVo effect notes an even more damaging trend line: people arrange their technology to not watch ads. Like the old high-low pricing strategy, consumers are being trained to think in a certain way which feeds on itself. This trend won’t be fixed by forcing cable companies to end fast forwarding for on-demand, btw.

Return on Marketing Investment
Paid sponsor search advertising should be the best method of getting the right audience at the right time and give them a great message. Is it? Google is still tweaking their search and ad placement for a reason:

[source: comScore blog]

Ad coverage is being managed down, and CTR’s are also declining. Google is likely responding to the backlash of the noise that exists in the paid search world, click farming, which exacts an unexpected toll on a system that was meant to be superior to other venues.

Google’s CTR’s are down over the past year. Is a similar trend of consumer ad avoidance entering paid search like it is with DVR’s? Maybe. Google’s inability to have any other significant revenue sources other than paid search should be a concern because the company has already trained users on many other services from maps to finance to expect any advertising trade off. Of course, they can be seen as Google’s own advertising campaign of sorts.

Relevance Marketing
The next wave of interactive marketing will not be about paid advertising at all. Video and blog publishing cost almost nothing but time to develop it. Leading marketers are realizing that transparency is essentially a requirement nowadays. An aside, how awesome is Trent in building anticipation: “soon” is all today’s post says.

It Should be What it Always Was
User based needs turned into unique solutions then communicated to end users in a way they can learn about the offer to then take action. That’s advertising in a nutshell and it hasn’t changed.

Interactive advertising has a long way to go to meet up with its name. In fact, most of the advertising that Google and Yahoo provide isn’t interactive, it is just a more efficient form of classifieds followed up with almost 1999 web page as product brochure sales sheet. Google, et al, innovated the business model of classified, not the classified ad itself.

There’s a lot more to be explored here and with luck, a bit more on examples of what’s on track.