Dave Winer is a very bright man who is full of wonderful ideas and opinions. That said, I don’t always agree with him. Today, for instance. On his blog, Scripting News in a post title “Online Advertising is Now Dead,” he says:
Assuming the economy comes back from the recession-depression thing that it’s in now, when it does, we will have completely moved on from [online] advertising.
His rationale seems crystal clear:
No one needs advertising, and there are much better ways to sell products….
Remember that perfectly targeted advertising is just information.
I’ll give you an example.
The other day I broke the carafe on my Cuisinart coffee maker. Looked up the model on Amazon, found the related entry (”people who bought this also bought this”) — and there it is. Click the Buy Now button, whole transaction from breakage of carafe to the order, about 5 minutes. No advertising involved.
Dave’s right that no advertising was involved but I don’t see how this means we will not use online advertising in the future. To the contrary, I think that advertising will continue and it will adapt to the rules of its operating environment.
In his post, he further says,
The web will still be used for commercial purposes, people will still buy things from Amazon and Amazon-like sites, but they will find information for products as they do now, by searching for it, and finding out what other people think, not by clicking on ads and buying things on the pages they link to.
I’m not so sure. Yes, people hate banner ads and they are lame online retreads of what has been used in newspapers. Winer sees a future where bloggers engaged in conversation (eg, reviews and recommendations) will create enough of a crowd-based shit detector that there will be no need for ads. More to the point, manufacturers are fickle and will cut their ad budgets in the face of things like our current economic collapse.
It’s the first thing companies cut when business dries up, and it’ll be completely forgotten when the economy comes back. Growth will come from putting your commercial information where people will find it when they’re looking and that won’t cost anything.
I’m not so sure. While bloggers help one avoid the pitfalls of modern shopping, they are not going to be omniscient. Further, I don’t believe that a world devoid of hyped-up sizzle will generate enough sales to keep a company in business.
And what about new products? New companies? New brands? The word will always have to get out. And marketers will always be looking for an edge, even when it’s unfair.
Take for example a practice like “buzz” marketing, which uses, to my mind, intentionally deceptive techniques to promote products or a brand. While not online marketing, it portends of what could happen, in light of Dave’s vision of a market based on recommendation. Buzz marketing involves a person, generally of the opposite sex, being paid to say good things about a product in settings where unsuspecting people, so-called influencers or trendsetters, are at leisure. These individuals are fed a line by an attractive person which, because of the setting (bars) and hormones, they believe is a real opinion and frequently adopt it. They share this opinion with their friends. Their friends attach more importance to the message because it sounds like its coming from a trusted friend even though it’s not. It’s a “long” con and one that could be easily adopted to the Net, if it hasn’t already been
I think buzz marketing is contemptible but it is a successful model for co-opting real desire with a manufactured one. And people on the Net, bloggers in this case, are just as susceptible to co-option as anyone. (Read William Gibson’s book, Pattern Recognition, for a terrific adventure in the manipulation of desire by marketers.)
So my bottom line is this: Advertisers will be with us as long as entrepreneurs want to sell. Someone has to beat the drum to call people to look at new stuff. Online advertising as we know it will certainly change; today it’s still steeped in the marketing practices of the last century. It may become something like buzz marketing or it might be a system of product placement or straight-up bribery or something as inconceivable as a free service. Whatever it becomes, online advertising is alive and well and growing.
No Comments on "On The Death of Online Advertising"