Advertising will get disrupted – and disrupted – and..
Newspapers and TV stations all over the world face declining advertising revenues. Still, people don’t quite seem to grasp the reason for that: there is a better alternative.
The price of advertising is obviously correlated with the impact it leaves on its desired targets.
The more impact you have with an advertisement, the higher the price. The more focused target group you can show the ad to, the higher the price.
Before advertising really took off on the internet, measuring the impact of advertising probably resembled – by today’s standards – a guessing game: you inferred impact from general audience or viewership numbers. A huge ad in the NYT was worth more than a small ad in the Rocky Mountain News.
What happened with advertising in the internet age?
Finally, the impact of advertising was really measurable – with far better accuracy.
As Steven Johnson so expertly puts it in “The Invention of Air”:
As is so often the case in the history of science, an increase in the accuracy of measurement led to a fundamental shift in the perception of the world. Marking changes in the temperature of ocean water enabled navigators to identify and exploit a pattern in the ocean’s currents that they had blindly stumbled across in centuries past: a river of warm water that runs from the tropics all the way up the coastline of North America, and then makes a sharp right turn toward Europa as it passes Cape Cod.
An increase in the accuracy of measurement led to the conclusion that traditional forms of advertising looked – and still look – more doomed by the day. Not focused, not relevant, not measurable – therefore there is no justifiable reality-based price-setting mechanism.
And this accuracy of measurement will get upended again and again.
Google didn’t just display ads more intelligently on its search engine. It found a way to display more relevant ads and therefore more valuable ads.
There will be ways to measure even more accurately, whether actual consumers find the ad to be relevant – and to give advertisers direct feedback on that.
Umair Haque has it right:
Imagine a button underneath every ad at every newspaper, magazine, and blog that said: “tell us this ad sucks”.
Which will, in turn, disrupt current forms of advertising again.
Advertising will get ever more focused, more relevant and more measurable. And those forms of advertising will always be able to command high prices.
Think about it for a moment: Internet advertising revenues are expected to drop.
Is it the recession or another upending of current advertising models?
And truth be told: when some years will have passed, there may be no advertising anymore – it may be called user-requested product information.
