ADOI Blog

READING BETWEEN THE LINES ONLINE

mackattack on 05 15, 2008

BY MAC ATTACK

Advertising has undergone several radical changes of late, as the connectivity between millions of computers and servers afforded by the internet opens up immense possibilities. Fortunes had been made and lost. Advertisers embraced, and then quickly abandoned methods of advertising online.

One such example was the promise of email as the more economically viable alternative to direct mail. Now it’s just spam offering a bigger appendage between your legs, solving the uncomfortable situation when it won’t work and some form of new scientific discovery that allows you to spray some liquid on yourself and make women fall madly in love with you.

Now there’re opt-in lists and click through advertising. The advertising has been fooled – or fooled itself – that reach is everything. Microsoft made a bid for Yahoo purely on the basis that it would broaden their reach. Despite losing ground to Google, Yahoo is still commands healthy numbers and a plethora of appealing online applications. Microsoft lost the battle and abandoned the bid.

Guess what? Google helped Yahoo stay independent by throwing as many options as they could so the Yahoo board were not pushed to make a decision in Microsoft’s favour. “They were under hostile attack, and we wanted to make sure they had as many options as possible,” Brin said of Yahoo during a news conference at Google’s Mountain View headquarters in prelude to its annual shareholders meeting.

Yeah. Why amalgamate two companies into one, when more fragmented reach – something the nerdy crowd knows as the ‘holy grail’ – can often induce advertisers and agencies to spend more money by replicating campaigns across multiple search platforms.

Here’s the problem though. A large part of this ‘reach’ is ignoring those ads. They get old really fast, even the Flashed-based ones with clever animation and text effects. In fact, the fancy ones where the animation jumps right in your face when you simply mouse over them are the most irritating. Some friends of mine are working on an application that blocks that rubbish out, especially from traditional news agencies trying to work themselves into the web.

The point is, often times reach is nothing without substance. David Ogilvy once said “What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it.” And it has never been more true today. Google makes people bid for words, which in certain cases can cost a small fortune given the search frequency of the word. The proliferation of blogs has made this form of advertising a really handy way to amass reach. They place Google ads, or something similar in nature in their blogs and hope to get a check once every 2-3 months when or whenever Google owes them anything more than a 100 bucks.

I have no problems with the bloggers making some money. Hosting can be expensive if they have their own domain, plus it would not hurt to have a little bit more dosh in one’s pockets. What irks me is the ads themselves. In short, they suck.

What we need are more compelling ads appearing online. What are you saying, exactly. How much can you say without distracting your audience from his main issue at hand, reading the content and trying very hard to ignore your advertising message.

I wish David Ogilvy was alive today. He would have understood and I will be the first to put my money down that he will come out with kickass campaigns – reach notwithstanding. Long before the chaps pinging “Project Petaling Street” – or for a more international example, Digg – discovered that headlining is key to pulling readers in, Claude Hopkins was writing the book on it.

I hopped over to the 4A website yesterday www.aaaa.org.my and found this interesting snippet. ROLES and RESPONSIBILITIES. The second item caught my eye. It said:

To enable Members to keep abreast of the changing communications landscape, so that they can evolve and be capable of adapting to new developments.

That would be one of the reasons that drove them to organise the Web 2.0 forum recently. Such was the fire, you have to email Ham directly to ask what transpired. The other was the realisation of the influence that blogs have been credited with having contributed greatly to the political tsunami that hit our nation recently.

The thinking must be that if it can shake the ruling government to the core, it should be able to be a brand building tool. Well, yes and no.
Online advertising sure did one hell of a job building Google‘s brand, with the money they made from advertisers. On the other hand, YouTube – has yet to make money and is finding ways to fix that. Guess where they figure their money is going to come from. You. The advertising industry. The Brand owners.

They just haven’t figured out how they are going to do it yet, although some things are already in the pipeline. I won’t go into details, but the talk is that the big money will be when YouTube and the likes hit TV screens via internet connected PVRs. If you don’t know what that is, you are in serious shit.

Or so the technology soothsayers will have you think. I suggest you find out what a PVR can do for your brand – and there are lots – but the key thing here is that again these new technologies and frontiers of advertising are going back to the past, the fundamentals of advertising. Something you guys know a heck of a lot better than some dweeb sitting on a red bean bag writing algorithms.

Start taking the lead! I know some agencies are, but they are big ones who can afford to pull in real talent who understand the game – people like Emmanuel Allix from GroupM. I know for a fact that GroupM aggressively seeks out new technology, thoroughly evaluates it and often goes about testing it on a micro scale, all the while looking at how these technologies can converge with how media is being bought – and let’s not forget CREATED – traditionally.

Your next great advertising messiah might be that copywriter who still understands and puts to practice what David Ogilvy, Claude Hopkins, or Bill Bernbach believed and put to practice so many years ago.

There’s a lot of money from Ventures going into online advertising – hoping to cash in on cashing out during IPO’s or when someone like Google or Microsoft loses their minds and forks out billions for something that does not make money yet – deeming it a necessary acquisition for THEIR advertising strategies.

Meanwhile, the industry hosts Media 2.0 and from what I have been told, was a hot session with the 4As President reminding “Citizen Nades that the ad industry had the ‘balls’ to hold such a Forum unlike what Nades exclaimed about advertisers not wanting to take that leap of faith into online”.

Well Nades, balls or otherwise, I have a sneaking suspicion that barring some of the bigger ones, most 4A members may have no idea what they can do online, how to measure it effectively for their clients, what sort of return it will bring, and what to do when the shit hits the fan.

I’ll bet David Ogilvy would figure something out, and it would be a kickass Yahoo campaign as well!

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