Aside from that, and more importantly I think, is the trend towards more accountability for the spend, which in many ways is causing the effects you accurately point out above – the disconnects, hiding from relevance, questioning the business model.

The reality is each media does a pretty good job at something for some products. There’s nothing “wrong” with mass media or social media.

What’s wrong – and leads to the accountability problem – is people trying to solve problem X with a media whose strength is solving problem Y.

In the end, the optimal Marketing outcome is achieved by layering *and connecting* Awareness media, Intent / Desire media, Interface / Design media, and Action / Reaction media – and measuring each against the specific job they were designed to do.

If this idea is interesting to you and you want to know more, see the Marketing Bands Series for an example:

http://blog.jimnovo.com/marketing-bands-series/

“10 percent of success is determined by the creative”…but isn’t interesting that a surprisingly large percentage of the Fortune 500 firms let their creative agencies (of record) define the overall campaign targeting/segmentation?

Any wonder why we see disconnects and/or friction between the paid search/display media targeting strategies which unfortunately result in finger pointing and/or conflicting analytical points of view presented to the VP of Marketing/Advertising.

While all too many large creative agencies promote their industry awards as supporting evidence they can build general purpose “bloatware” websites, consumers are voting (thru relevance) for distributed content & narrowly defined niche content needs directly proportional to their point in time requirements.

Is it any wonder why the traditional big creative agency model has recently been questioned in some corners of the industry as perhaps an obsolete business model when it comes to effectively understanding the targeting effectiveness of today’s online consumer.

Yes. Exactly.

I’ll publish what I’ve been saying for years. I’m a male information working in the 21rst century. My attention span has been fragmenting ever since I was exposed to Nickolodeon. If you’re going to push content into my face – delight me. Just delight me.

To the root of your point, if I may Jim, we need to think more about the effects that we’re trying to have and then really examine whether or not the underlining causes are really what we think they are.

Your post has a ring of truth to it, so I’m inclined to agree with your bias here.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by jacqueswarren: Anti free crap evangelism, sane comment on value of online advertising. From @jimnovo again http://bit.ly/3C34j6…

I was not suggesting a crossing of the advertorial Rubicon ;).

More, the *perception* by *readers* of highly targeted magazines that the advertising is as valuable to them as the content – not that the advertising *is* content. And the web would be much better off going with this highly targeted, narrowcast magazine model rather than a broader audience newspaper model. The web’s infrastructure is built for this approach; “braodcasting” goes against the behavior of the audience.

I have suggested before on this blog that the unique content asset of newspapers is local / state investigative reporting. That 60% or so of the content of a newspaper could be AP wire stuff and still be appealing to audiences other than the non-web savvy seems like a stretch. On the other hand, to give away this unique investigative content free on the web doesn’t make any sense either (though you could tease it?). So somewhere in all this is a hybrid, where newspapers bifurcate and become a bit more audience-centric.

Here in St Petersburg FL the Times has an interesting experiment going on called tbt:

http://www.tampabay.com/tbt/

This physical, offline paper is free distribution, targeted to youth. If you can believe what the Marketing folks over there say, advertisers love this paper. Content is brief and shallow, (sort of) like online. But – and this is the key – the advertising is very highly targeted to the people who read the paper, which rarely happens online with general news websites. They read it as much for the advertising as the content. Maybe *primarily* for the advertising – it’s convenient for them.

So tbt is different, it’s *better* than the Times newspaper or a news website for the demo, which is *local* youth – local being something tough to replicate as a web-only operation while maintaining content quality.

One has to wonder if the distribution mode has a lot to do with this – tbt is available at coffee shops, stores etc. – places young people want to be, not where they don’t want to be (home).

Conversely, this 50 year old guy looks forward to reading the Sunday paper at home, looking foward to what the investigative folks at the Times have uncovered this week.

Perhaps “one paper” simply cannot gross enough audience any longer, and that one paper needs to be 2. Or more.

Here’s my question.

As someone who’s worked in newspapers for a while, the idea of “ads being content” is… strange. I realize this is the Internet we’re talking about, and the rules are different. But really? Do you think people will be OK with it if content–free or not–transmogrifies into advertising?

Curious to hear your thoughts.

Cheers,
DK

http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/en/art/712

Briefly, social marketing works best when it’s intrusive, like Advertising.

Houston, we have a problem.

Needless to say that what you are saying here can be linked to what you wrote in the past about how advertising can work in social media only under very special conditions.

What I meant is this: Understanding the Behavioral aspects of a visitor is the most profitable mechanism to use to drive successful online Marketing efforts, but trying to implement this on the advertising side (ads following the visitor around) is a mistaken approach.

If you allow visitors to build targeted content for themselves, tbe visitor will draw the ads to them; this is essentially what happens in Search – and what happens with Magazines.

This would be so easy to implement with micropayments in Google Reader, for example. When you buy ads, you are buying the contextual Behavior of a User, not the specific content of a Site they are Reading, and the Site is compensated on a per view basis for producing Content the User desires. This would drive content *quality* instead of quantity, which flips the current web model over and aligns it with how people really use the web, as opposed to following the offline Broadcast model.

I’m not saying this approach would *replace* the mass-media-ish Display model because it has a place for some Sites and Markets, but it’s limited in application and already exists eleswhere. The web could and should do much better because it can!

It’s insane for the web to shout about how “it’s different” but then go ahead and copy the worst parts of the offline media model; this is the Paradox I frequently refer to.

Some may think the difference described above is semantics but just think about it; the context for the ads is completely different when they are Pulled rather than Pushed, and this is why magazines outperform most other media on a Productivity basis. If we are going to use Behavior as a Targeting mechanism, we should use it properly – in Pull mode, not Push. Push is for Broadcast – basically because you have no choice in that medium.

That does not mean Broadcast is bad, it’s just different; at least it does not pretend to be anything other than what it is. The web, on the other hand, spends a lot of time and energy trying to pretend it’s Broadcast (Demographics and Push) instead of feeling comfortable with what is the Natural model for the web – Behavior and Pull.

Meanwhile, the smart buyers of Display media (and I must emphasize the word smart here) know all this and that’s why they are not “all in”. If the web stopped trying to be Broadcast and went with its Natural model, the smart buyers of Display would be fighting each other to get in.

Smart buyers do not want media that’s the Same, they want media that is Different and they are more than willing to pay for it. This is why media don’t “die”, they simply (eventually) find their Natural place in the mix. It certainly is about time the web got on with it, and especially so when evidence of the correct model (Behavior – Pull) is so clear (Search).

The economics of the Behavior – Pull approach just make so much more sense for everybody online – visitor, publisher, media buyer.

Hmm, seems like the above ended up more like a Post than a Comment – hope it explains the idea more clearly!

However, regarding behavioral targeting it can be used both on- and off-site so maybe you should better clarify what you meant?

Thanks,

Jiri