Keynesian Marketing
March 23rd, 2008 by JeremyJohn Maynard Keynes wasn’t always right as an economist but he certainly had a pithy turn of phrase. One of his aphorisms, “You can’t push on a piece of string”, seems pretty relevant today as a critique of wrong-headed online marketing strategy (ie, most of it).
I’d define any marketing plan that relies on broadcasting interruptive messages one-way to a passive audience (whatever the medium) as “pushing on a string” and destined to underwhelm as a result.
Many of us utopians remain hopeful that the web will change this kind of thinking. As Jakob Nielson says,” The web is not a selling medium; it is a buying medium. It is user controlled, so the user controls, the user experiences”.
But billions of corporate, VC and investment bank money seem to belie this idea. The entire digital incumbency – in which I include Google, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, News Corp (MySpace), Facebook and most digital ad agencies – aided and abetted by the vast majority of marketers, are betting the farm on increasingly invasive tracking technologies that will allow companies to whack unsuspecting (and certainly uninterested) users with ever more ‘relevant’ interruptive messages.
The truth is that a click-through rate of 1% is a pipe-dream for the vast majority of banner advertising. That means 99% or more of people ignore them whether they’re rich-media, expandable, behaviorally targeted or just plain everywhere (known as ‘digital domination’ apparently).
This might all just be an inevitable phase in the development of the web. In a year or so poor returns and privacy bills might combine to slash Google’s share price back to some semblance of reality (that process might have begun already) and force a major rethink among marketers and their agencies.
At which point perhaps marketers might spare a thought for giving consumers what they actually want.
Tags: advertising, agency, Google, marketer, Microsoft, Online advertising, strategy, Yahoo
