online advertising

I've lost count of the number of articles I've read over the years declaring the death of online advertising. The reasons cited usually touch at some point on banner blindness, falling click-through-rates (the average CTR having dropped to less than a tenth of 1%), and the uneven distribution of clicks (Comscore's 'Natural Born Clickers' study for example showing that only 8% of Internet users account for 85% of all clicks).

Reckitt Benckiser ("RB") made ad trade headlines last week when it announced a record-setting $40 million web video buy for 2010. What shocked everyone wasn't the dollar amount but rather that the company pretty much doesn't care where the ads run.

Like many of you, I enjoy reading The Ad Contrarian blog, ran by an agency CEO Bob Hoffman. In a sense, TAC is the ad industry's Perez Hilton: he draws in crowds by doodling on faces of today's idols; more often than not that's online advertising in general and social media in particular. Some of his posts are right on target, others are wildly off, but all are usually entertaining.

by: Dick Stroud

Many thanks to Martijn de Haas for telling me about this report from the European Interactive Advertising Association titled: “Marketers’ Internet Ad Barometer 2009.”

by: David Polinchock

by: Jonathan Salem Baskin

(This essay was co-authored with Jeff Molander, Web marketing expert, speaker and CEO of Molander & Associates Inc.)

Just as Part 1 of this essay looked at Google's innovation at the "macro" level, we want to look at what Facebook is doing at the literal other end of the telescope.

by: Dick Stroud

Who sees the most ad clutter? Instinctively you would have said it is younger people.

You would be wrong. This is a chart taken from the Nielsen blog. Ad clutter increases with age. It is their grandparents who are deluged in the nasty sticky stuff.

by: Sigurd Rinde

Seems it has dawned upon the VCs that yet another social network might not be the thing.

And when two "Facebook widget applications" (heh, a category by itself) startups are valued at substantially more than Bear Stearns, well, how can you avoid being hit by a blinding flash of the obvious: Something is not quite right.

by: Guy Kawasaki

My buddy David Szetela writes a new column for SearchEngineWatch called "Profitable PPC." In his first column, "PPC Advertising: Art or Science?," he mentions a book called Scientific Advertising by Claude C. Hopkins. The book was first published in 1923--long before TV or online advertising. Hopkins is the inventor of test marketing, coupon sampling, and copy research.

by: Gary Hayes