Jon Gibbs, VP of media analytics at The Nielsen Company recently wrote an article for nielsenwire titled “Online Advertising Grows Up.” He makes a case for how the Internet is being taken “seriously,” citing the creation of Hulu by Fox and NBC, Google’s phenomenal track record with online advertising, Apple’s reshaping of the music industry with iTunes, and the growing metroplex we call Facebook. Excellent examples, all.
But he asks, “If the Internet has truly ‘arrived’ and is being taken seriously, why have we not yet seen significant brand advertising dollars follow?”
Well, Jon, I’m no expert but I’ll give you my reason. The old 800–pound gorilla . . .
Clickability.
Now that advertisers know how many consumers have clicked on their Web ad, they’re not exactly bowled over by the results. Frankly, I don’t know what they expected. Click rates of 0.5 percent are not all that uncommon. Indeed, click rates very much resemble direct-mail return rates, and frankly it makes sense.
What I don’t understand is why legacy media hasn’t done more research to determine if those low click rates are indigenous to the Web. Newspapers, magazines, radio, and television have a long history of handing the baton off to the advertiser once their audience has been successfully sold. It was up to the advertiser to create a compelling message to generate response.
For Web sites, the onus for response rests squarely on their own shoulders. Basically, because it can. Advertisers are more than happy to hang the Web site out to dry if the response isn’t adequate. They would have done it with legacy media, but advertisers had no metric to know for sure.
It may be the Web’s ultimate undoing—a failure to monetize itself. Ironic that what was touted as the grail for advertisers is fast becoming a tin cup.
So much for transparency.
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