It's the concrete measurement of effectiveness in the "click-through" that has caused much of the problem.
Ad sales people could always sell traditional ads with some vague fuzzy sense of it being effective. If you wanted proof otherwise, you had to do focus group studies, etc.
But web advertising has a real, trackable statistic available immediately: the clickthrough. This only measures immediate response, however. Delayed responses, effects on brand recognition, and consumer opinion all get ignored when you look *just* at the click-throughs alone.
The result is ads that work like television ads are being judged like telemarketing campaigns. IOW, it's as if the effectiveness of Burger King TV ads are judged soley on the basis of how many viewers immediately turned off their televisions and bought a Whopper(tm). Worse than that -- a lot of clients pay for the clickthroughs only, so it's as though Burger King only has to *pay* for those people.
Instead of responding to this foolish request to charge only for click-thrus, some ad sales people agreed in order to make the quick buck. That forced everyone else to follow suit. They promised to drive traffic to client sites without thinking about it carefully, and it turned out to be a lot harder than they thought. Now we all -- as web readers -- get to suffer because of it. If there's anything *good* about the study mentioned in this article, it's that it does measure branding as a benefit. The value of branding is a no-brainer for most people, but it's new territory for web advertising clients.
It's amazing how much ill-will music companies are willing to generate just to get a little more dough. It's really foolish: Sharing promotes purchasing. How many CDs are in my collection because someone ripped me a copy onto CD-R or tape, and I liked it enough to buy it? 100 of em? 150? Something like that. Well, so much for those sales in the future....
I'm beginning to think a lot of the anti-piracy activity isn't there to stop piracy. It's there so labels can say "it's not our fault our profits are slipping! It's Napster/Gnutella/etc!"
That way they don't have to take responsibilty for driving the customer away with mediocre music, anti-consumer business practices, and inflated pricing.
-- John (who purchases six CDs a year now, instead of six a month.)
Yes, the "bully factor" was what I was whining about. I don't think corporations shouldn't be allowed legal recourse, but I do think they shouldn't have quite so much ability to write those laws and choose when and where they're enforced.
I'm amazed that I'm not allowed to try to figure out how Adobe's PDF format works, for example -- or reverse-engineer my Sony Playstation.
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Ad sales people could always sell traditional ads with some vague fuzzy sense of it being effective. If you wanted proof otherwise, you had to do focus group studies, etc.
But web advertising has a real, trackable statistic available immediately: the clickthrough. This only measures immediate response, however. Delayed responses, effects on brand recognition, and consumer opinion all get ignored when you look *just* at the click-throughs alone. The result is ads that work like television ads are being judged like telemarketing campaigns. IOW, it's as if the effectiveness of Burger King TV ads are judged soley on the basis of how many viewers immediately turned off their televisions and bought a Whopper(tm). Worse than that -- a lot of clients pay for the clickthroughs only, so it's as though Burger King only has to *pay* for those people.
Instead of responding to this foolish request to charge only for click-thrus, some ad sales people agreed in order to make the quick buck. That forced everyone else to follow suit. They promised to drive traffic to client sites without thinking about it carefully, and it turned out to be a lot harder than they thought. Now we all -- as web readers -- get to suffer because of it. If there's anything *good* about the study mentioned in this article, it's that it does measure branding as a benefit. The value of branding is a no-brainer for most people, but it's new territory for web advertising clients.
It's amazing how much ill-will music companies are willing to generate just to get a little more dough. It's really foolish: Sharing promotes purchasing. How many CDs are in my collection because someone ripped me a copy onto CD-R or tape, and I liked it enough to buy it? 100 of em? 150? Something like that. Well, so much for those sales in the future....
I'm beginning to think a lot of the anti-piracy activity isn't there to stop piracy. It's there so labels can say "it's not our fault our profits are slipping! It's Napster/Gnutella/etc!"
That way they don't have to take responsibilty for driving the customer away with mediocre music, anti-consumer business practices, and inflated pricing.
-- John (who purchases six CDs a year now, instead of six a month.)Yes, the "bully factor" was what I was whining about. I don't think corporations shouldn't be allowed legal recourse, but I do think they shouldn't have quite so much ability to write those laws and choose when and where they're enforced. I'm amazed that I'm not allowed to try to figure out how Adobe's PDF format works, for example -- or reverse-engineer my Sony Playstation.
What? You haven't picked up on the new legal system in the US? If it annoys a large company, it's illegal.