Advertising Is Dying !

Advertising was based on a foundation which turns out to be a house of cards. Since the first days of newspaper advertising, it’s been accepted by everyone that advertising is non-accountable. Advertising works, based on logic that if you put an ad in front of enough people enough times, they spend money (?). but if u ask real businessmen or USAHAWAN around , they will tell u this logic is unacceptable . even some of my friends who work in promotion n marketing department always make joke like this ,

“I know half of my advertising budget is wasted , but I don’t know which half (Ha!ha!)”

Well , actually , this joke is not a joke . in fact , I bet more than 80% money that all companies spend on advertising (TV,radio,magazine,newspaper,tec) is doing no good . Trillions of dollars or RM a year are spent on advertising and it’s been generally accepted that half of that money (and likely more) is wasted .

What if you could actually find which dollars were going to be a waste before you spent them? That’s what’s happening in the world of advertising. New techniques for measuring the effectiveness of advertising (a movement cleverly called “accountability”) are appearing every day. dozens of advanced companies had methods to track and measure whether every dollar spent on an ad turned into a sale. All of a sudden, we can now start to see which ads are working and which ones are waste. And, as we predicted, most of them are waste. If you watch users interact with web sites containing advertising, you quickly notice how the users develop techniques to avoid looking at the ads. We’re not the only ones seeing this. Anybody who watches users with an eye tracker on pages with advertising can see how users avoid looking at the ads. Others have seen how users even avoid looking at the innocuous Ad-sense ads that populate many sites. This isn’t just on the Internet. People buy DVRs so they can skip ads on TV. They rent movies and TV show DVD collections to avoid sitting through ads. And now they download shows from iTunes so they can watch a 1-hour show in 42 minutes. So, with these new tools for accountability, we can see where the waste is happening. And, from what we’ve seen in our research, it’s happening practically everywhere.

Why advertise ? because we are all made to believe advertising , whatever medium it is , is the only way . But now, we have new tools. We have methods to say which ads are working and which ones aren’t doing anything. As a result of those analysis , they conclude that advertising is near to useless to many companies , in other words , we can just say they are tricked by the advertising companies , n maybe the marketing managers .
Anyway , after the logic kind of people discover this , they will say :
-We wont spend on something that is not working . or , when these managers become more intelligent , they will say :
-We wont spend on something that cannot be measured .
When that happens , we can officially declare ADVERTISING is dead .

So, where will those trillions of dollars go? Into a better marketing investment, I believe. And that investment will be improving the customer experience.
If you look at any study in the last ten years about how people are influenced to make purchases, u’ll see the biggest contributor isn’t television or radio advertising. It’s not the animated ads that float across your screen when you’re trying to do something else. It’s not billboards or direct mail. It’s not celebrity endorsements like Mawi or Rosyam Nor , or having a logo featured on a Formula One race car.

A friend spent a couple of thousand hours over the last few years analysing website visitor behaviour and he believes ADVERTISING is dying , except that he doesn’t think the situation will change very fast in the Internet space even though this is the most accountable and measurable of all advertising media . How many online ads are counted as viewed when they are blocked by an ad blocker? Yet advertisers still spend money on this.How many online ads are counted as served when a website visitor closes the ad down before it has even completely appeared on their screen? Yet advertisers still spend their money on this?How many online ads annoy website visitors and create a negative brand experience the opposite effect to that the advertiser intends? Yet advertisers still spend their money.How many companies undertake Search Engine Optimisation only to direct customers to useless or ineffective landing pages? Yet advertisers are spending increasing amounts of money on this activity.I quote this from TIME magazine , Internet Advertising is set to grow globally to $51.6 billion by 2010 at a rate of 18.1% . We live in a consumer world where black is marketed as white, the Emperor has no clothes and truth and logic have little place.

I don’t believe the myth that users expect everything for free. I think HBO, the Wall Street Journal, EUROSPORTS , and, yes, ASTRO have all proved, among others, that people will pay for quality content and services. People will pay for value. The trick is understanding what that value is.

Now many do advertising sponsorships of content, the content producer focuses less on the value to the consumer and, instead, focuses on delivering value to the advertiser. Sometimes, they can deliver that value by producing high-quality audiences for the advertisers. But, more times than not, they don’t. Since advertisers can’t tell if their spend is working for them, it wasn’t worth the effort to make something people really want. The result is advertiser-sponsored content bends to the mediocre.

Those relationships have to be direct, and human , like mouth to mouth marketing , or SALESMAN-ship – some call this method as Viral Marketing . On both the vendor and the customer side. Yes, this will be tunggang-terbalik . Much falling apart will happen before something that works comes together. But it's better to get ahead of this curve than behind it .
There are new skills to develop here. We can't tell customers to read the bug lists and check the man pages.

We'll have help from technology, specifically social software. Wikis, blogs and IM are three obvious ones. But we need more. Especially around corporate websites. We need to get marketing out of the website construction game. Company websites should provide the shortest possible routes between customers and useful information. Period. That goes for both prospective and existing customers. There should also be some linkage outside to other sites that are useful to customers. A site that's "sticky" , spam-like is busy failing.