MattCreamer.com

Whenever I talk to non-industry people about hot topics in advertising, the boom in Internet ads comes up. As I’m describing all the hope that the publishers, agencies, and advertisers are putting on the web as an ad-friendly successor to TV or magazines, a look of incredulity usually washes across their face. Invariably, they ask the question: Who clicks on those ads anyway? Those ads–they’re boring, so easy to avoid and, unless we’re talking about search ads, they just get in the way of whatever you’re doing. Yet these same people might be using Nike+ to chart their running performance or using Johnson & Johnson’s Babycenter for information on, I don’t know, diaper rash. They’re not oppose to brands communicating with them, they’re just not into getting pounded with ads.

This is the disconnect when it comes to web marketing. It’s a great marketing medium, provided your definition of marketing includes providing content that’s useful or entertaining. As an ad medium in the traditional sense, as a way to interrupt consumers with your message, it’s lacking. I guess you could say that whole marketing-as-interruption mindset is lacking. I’ve been thinking about it for a while and wrote it about in today’s Ad Age, which happens to be an issue dedicated to digital. Here’s an excerpt:

But for the marketer, it’s a whole different story. First off, there’s reason to be skeptical about online’s effectiveness, long its point of differentiation. To be sure, any web ad is more addressable, more measurable than its equivalents in broadcast and print, but, at the same time, there are big questions about how to measure them. One old way, the click-through rate, has recently come under fire in studies suggesting that a large percentage of clicking is done by a small segment of less-than-desirable consumers, i.e., the kind of people who spend a lot of time doing online gambling and sweepstakes and who don’t boast big incomes. Bad credit is about the only thing missing from this portrait of the heavy clicker as rabble, a portrait, by the way, that answers the question we’ve all asked ourselves with equal parts wonderment and pity: Who clicks on these things anyway?

Second, and much more important, is that the marketer, once at the mercy of a locked-up media landscape, can now be a player in it.

“The big difference is that marketers are in the same competitive set as media owners,” said Matt Freeman, CEO of Tribal DDB. He cites Pepsi, one of Tribal’s clients, as an example of a company that could be a giant media player if it wanted. It doesn’t want to because the big traffic it gets at its corporate websites has nothing to do with how it’s valued. But the twist on media and marketing convention is clear: “Before there was an investor and a recipient of that investment. I think today you have much more of a triangulation where marketers can invest directly in going to consumers, obviating the need for media owners. They are not necessarily the client of owners and, in some cases, they are their competitors.”

In other words, marketers can build website that do cool, useful stuff. There are any number of marketers, from Amazon to Papa John’s, working to monetize their corporate websites traffic by selling ads there, but that, of course, is only the most mundane way. Better examples include Johnson & Johnson and its BabyCenter, a deep repository of information about raising a newborn that’s a clear competitor to Bonnier or Meredith, the publishers of Parenting and Parents magazines respectively. Nike Plus, whose sharp interface connects runners all over the world, is a real threat to any traditional media owners who wants to engage with that running population.

“I keep talking about there being paid media and earned media,” Mr. Freeman said. “In television there’s really no such thing as earned media. Sure, there are press mentions, but you’re not on even footing. It’s not a fair fight with the media owner. On the internet, it is a fair fight.”

Read the whole piece here.