Unsolved: advertising in the digital age
June 6, 2009
Newspapers falling right and left, TV networks desperately getting facelifts to try and still look relevant, here we go:
(With apologies to Don McLean and Tip O’ The Hat to Coturnix)
Categories: Uncategorized
Today I used Google maps on an iPod touch to navigate to a farmer’s market to buy my groceries. I spent very little at a major supermarket … I went to places where I could talk to the growers and find out about what I was buying. Where was this garlic grown? (He directed me to a different variety, closer to my preference…) what cheese is like what I want but not in stock? … have you tried this wine? No, but I purchased based on the WINEMAKER I knew from earlier.
Experience. Tech got me to the address, but could not substitute for the human touch.
Advertising, over time, became such a “smoke and mirrors” thing that it was, at least to me, self-defeating “industry.” It had people yelling at me, people making false claims for products, people telling me—in essence—nothing at all about the product being flogged, etc., etc.
Dying newspapers is part of the evolution of society and technology. I don’t see any big outcry for many products which became obsolete (like buggies, etc.)
The only worthwhile advertising is word-of-mouth, and it’ll kill off crappy stuff real fast, and rightfully so.
I never believed that the Internet would be a successful medium for general advertising.
Probably not – but it’s a hell of a channel for “word-of-mouth”, though.
I have actually bought stuff from ads that accompanied my Gmail messages, come to think of it.
Amen Gerry!
The death of newspapers was coming the instant we had an Internet boom. It’s an outdated content delivery model and efficient too. What could be more efficient that scrolling through my Google Reader determining what I want to read and what I do not.
The advertising has to be “narrowcast” rather than broadcast. The big boys didn’t get that for a long time, and they certainly didn’t get that the new paradigm would result in a revenue “adjustment” … to put it mildly.
Word of mouth is a major strength of icommerce, but now we have to critically evaluate personal endorsements, e.g., product reviews … my sense is that advertisers are paying people to do word of mouth, trying to create viral marketing.
When you see wildly disparate “reviews” of a product, it gets difficult. Who are these people? How valid was their “test bed”? Are they shills? The democratic nature of the web cuts both ways.
I feel fortunate that I have made friends via the net and subsequently met face-to-face. That “real” context has allowed me to become trustful of their opinions. Others I haven’t been able to meet (yet) due to geography, but over time they become just as trustworthy. That’s a good thing.