“I am not sure my purpose of advertising online?”

Yes! You hear me. “I am not sure why do i advertise online.” Does that sound familiar? =)

We talked about integration and performance of different media formats, but, most importantly, purpose. For example, what is the purpose of television? Awareness. The purpose of print (while it’s still around)? In-depth and qualitative. The purpose of radio? To connect with shoppers. And the purpose of outdoor advertising? To remind people who are in a position to shop. I know, this all seems simplistic.

But what about online advertising? Surely, search advertising’s purpose is to capture shopper intent. It does so extremely well, providing more economic visibility than any other advertising medium. It has made Google one of the most valuable media companies in only a few short years. In a book that i once read, What Would Google Do? As Mr Jeff Jarvis point out that it built a business on managing abundance rather than controlling scarcity. In a sense, it also created scarcity in that there are so many people who search on any given word in a day. The book logically captures the massive changes the internet is effecting in our culture, in marketing, and in advertising. But what about the rest of online advertising, such as display?

References:

Google (online). Retrieved, 26^th Jan 2009. URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

And that is precisely the problem. So far, with the exception of search, online advertising has failed to find its core purpose. And to characterize the rest of online advertising as a single entity wrongly diminishes the challenge, because there are many online ad formats. How people interact with and use online advertising? The problem is that basic, and we need to better understand it before we can even begin to think about measuring and connecting it to business performance goals.

Lastly, we arrived at the ultimate cliché: if you don’t like online advertising, it is easy! So easy - to condition yourself to ignore it! I used to think that AdBlocker Plus, the browser plugin that removes all ads from your Web experience, was a potential threat to the advertising business. I realize now that it is only a red herring because the human brain subconsciously takes care of the problems of irrelevancy, clutter and waste for us — most of the time.

References:

Adblock Plus: Save Your Time and Traffic (online). Retrieved, 26^th Jan 2009. URL: http://adblockplus.org/en/