Hynotoad makes baby Jesus cry. I wrote a huge diatribe on this matter on the newsgroups a couple of weeks ago, and now for your reading pleasure, I'm going to invoke the magic of copy and paste (I may try to edit it down a little, it was rather large), brace yourself:
As the vast majority of us know by now, a huge number of web based
businesses are failing. I'm sure that in the course of the last year, we've
all had a site we know disappear from the face of the world, from the eFront
fiasco to Disney's go.com. Also, I'm sure that we're all aware that the
reason for the disappearance of these sites is the failed internet
advertising model.
If you ask me though, the companies that have relied on advertising revenue
have been doomed from day one, and to try and run a business based on such a
thing, while lucrative for a short while, was never a good long term
investment. Why? Because the whole advertising model for the internet was
ludicrous. The list of terribly bad banners goes on for a very long time,
banners that try to induce epileptic fits the get a click by strobing garish
colours at you, to empty promises of what you *will* win if you click. The
fact of the matter is, that even the slowest of users will learn after a
while that trying to press the "X" to close the annoying flashing banner
will not have the desired effect, and as it turns out, you really don't win
$20 if you spank the monkey. After the inevitable failiure of such cheap
tactics, advertisers got more and more aggressive, insisting that sites pop
up larger advertisements, bombarding users with a deluge of high bandwidth
imagery and new browser windows that they are induced to frantically close
before they spawn another one.
What everyone seemed to have overlooked in this, is that it doesn't matter
how obvious or annoying a banner is, if you're not the sort of person who
likes to play in a different online casino every day, and let's face it,
most of us aren't, and you're smart enough to figure out that banners are
full of lies and false promises, sooner or later it drives a person to the
point where they will glady pay for a piece of software to save their eyes
and their bandwidth from these monsterous creations.
I have to wonder, who thought for a single second that these tactics might
have worked? Why is it such a departure from existing advertising methods?
If you look at established advertising methods, they are designed to invoke
interest and product awareness. At the moment, the internet is closer to a
magazine format, slowly moving towards more of an interactive television
style. Pick up a copy of a magazine, it won't take you long to find an
advertisement, does it make you want to vomit when you look at it? Is it an
advert for something that the entire readership of the magazine would never
for a second be interested in purchasing? Chances are, it's a visually
pleasing advertisement for a product that may interest the sort of person
that would read that magazine. The only magazines that I read these days are
publications such as Maxim, the adverts in there are for things like nice
clothes, cologne, beer, things that would interest your average reader of
said publication. They are visually pleasing for the most part, and I often
find myself looking at the ad because I feel that if nothing else, it's
extremely well done.
Television advertising is easier than magazine advertizing, you have the
benefit of motion and sound to show your product, so often far less artistic
merit is involved. The typical television ad is placed in a timeslot where
it will hit as much of its target demographic as possible, and are usually
either constructed to entertain, or to inform and raise awareness of the
product. Again, no flashing lights that might inspire you to throw the
nearest heavy object through the screen, in turn forcing you to find
alternative means of entertainment, and go and buy the product in question.
Another popular method of television advertising is sponsorship, this show
brought to you by product X etc, which again, has proven effective.
The existing methods of advertising are tried, tested, and above all, for
the most part extremely effective. What could make somebody think for a
second that the current internet advertising model could hope to produce
results, why take that approach when there are such tried and tested methods
already out there. I'll tell you why, because they don't care. I've worked
with a number of .coms, and the attitude is amazing. You wouldn't believe
how many times I've heard such wonders as, "Well, we're providing this for
free, so if we get a million pageviews per month, and only one percent of
those actually clicks on the banner, we'll be making $7bn/month in no
time.". This is an amazing and unbelievably common attitude. What these
people failed to see is that if it's not something that people want, or not
presented in a good way, nobody will click on it, that's zero percent of
your million pageviews a month to any .com entrepreneurs out there.
Of course, it's all come to a head now, and many people who deserve to are
going out of business for it, and taking many people with them who don't
deserve this.
There is a point to all of this though. This need never have happened if
people had done things the right way from the start. Sponsorship of sites
from companies will raise awareness of the sponsor, clever and classy still
advertisements, as well as video will generate interest and thus sales. Of
course, this isn't going to be cheap, but then, why did you think that you
could be cheap with the users of the internet in the first place? Are they
less discerning than the demographics of more traditional forms of media? Do
you think that it's worth spending millions on an advertisement for
television, and then having some second rate graphic designer throw together
a 468x60 for the internet? Advertising must integrate smoothly into the
existing content of the internet. It must be produced with style and class,
and above all, for God's sake, please think it through before you try
anything as stupid as the group of morons that started the current internet
advertising model.
