One of the most interesting topic I learnt from MKT595 week6 is internet advertising. The topic reminds me of what I think about advertising. There are studies about shrinking advertising market all over the place, and many people have been finding ways to make their advertisements work effectively to generate sales; of course, many of them yet get the answer. I personally think that there are too many advertisements in forms of TV commercial, poster, full-page in magazines, ad banner on webpage, you name it; consider the number of ads, it is natural why consumers want to avoid it as much as possible.
In the article “why advertising is failing on the internet”, Eric Clemons, a professor at The Wharton school of university of Pennsylvania, describes that advertising fails because of three reasons; Consumers don’t trust ads, don’t want to view ads, and don’t need ads. He says that researches show that ad banner has the least creditability; people almost always do something else while ads are on-air; and he cites his own research to confirm that people don’t need information from ads but rather they go to professional websites that give them reliable information. The author that these three problems (don’t trust, don’t want, and don’t need) will occur in every means of advertising; thus, to fix these problems is not about to find new mediums but rather create messages that are relevant to people.
Another interesting part in his article is when Clemons mentions that “…simple commercial messages, pushed through whatever medium, in order to reach a potential customer who is in the middle of doing something else, will fail. It’s not that we no longer need information to initiate or to complete a transaction; rather, we will no longer need advertising to obtain that information. We will see the information we want, when we want it, from sources that we trust more than paid advertising. We will find out what we need to know, when we want to make a commercial transaction of any kind.”
I personally can’t agree more with Clemons’ idea, though, I’m a little bit disappointed that he didn’t give a solid solution of how internet business who depends its revenue heavily on advertising will survive. So I come up with my own suggestion of what internet business could do to survive in shrinking internet ads environment:
1. Be relevance. Fundamentally, like what many internet marketers said, advertisements have to match with content of the particular websites.
2. Minimize advertisement space on their webpage, maintaining only those that are in relevant and outstanding positions on the page, in order to make viewer feel less annoyed. My theory is that if we can restrict the number of ads to one or two per webpage, viewers will be less annoyed and don’t need to use ad-blocking technology.
3. Restrict the number of advertisers in the websites. One of my hypothesis of why internet banner is not effective is that web visitors are bombarded with TOO many brands, so they are overloaded with information and possibly cannot remember even one of the ads. Thus, if we can restrict the number of brands appear in a site, reducing information and competition among ads, it will help generate more brand awareness or so forth for each ad.
4. If the suggestions above work well, website should measure the success rate, such as click-through rate, click-to-buy rate, and click-to-call rate, and use these information to charge more on advertising in their websites. Basically, sites will focus on few ads to boost their response rate and charge higher price for limited space rather than, what they are doing now, minimizing ad pricing to maximize the number of ad which we all know that it generates a very low response rate.
Link:
1. Why advertising is failing on the internet by Eric Clemons http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/22/why-advertising-is-failing-on-the-internet/
2. 1st picture from http://i.ehow.com/images/GlobalPhoto/Articles/4481740/internetadvertising-main_Full.jpg
3. 2nd picture from http://images01.tzimg.com/cache/h3w4/500_1187720922_219626_8890.jpg
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