It is about time to bring back the polar fleece here in Seattle and to discuss the merits of online marketing vs. the traditional methods. It surprises me that this "less filling, tastes great" argument persists in light of the clear migration from traditional media to online pursuits. More people are shopping online, reading online, playing online, meeting online, talking online and working online. This obvious migration would seem to render the "who has better value" argument meaningless but not so.

Ironically, the Advertising Age Digital  newsletter had 3 articles circling the same subject. One columnist attempted to assuage the billboard, print and television advertising market fears about the migration of cash to online by labeling digital marketing as "overhyped" (80 Billion? Online Display Market Is Being Overhyped), one provided a cautionary tale about staging online marketing campaigns (Why Digital Marketing Needs a Reboot) and one announced that GM has set 25% of its ad budget for online (At GM, 25% of Marketing Dollars Doled Out to Digital).

For me, the bottom line is that Marshall McLuhan’s conclusion that the medium is the message still holds true. And yes, death knells for any medium may be premature. However, search advertising has changed the landscape and the rules by inserting the message into a specific stage of the purchase process and introducing a cost per action payment model. With print you pay for the space regardless of those who skip that section of the newspaper or flip past that page in the magazine. Television ads cost the same no matter how many viewers leave the room or TIVO out the commercials and billboards charge the same amount despite no hard figures on how many folks actually “see” the message. According to published data, most drivers are text messaging, playing with their Nanos or fiddling with the GPS. Search advertising distinguished itself by tying its costs to a specific customer action, a click on the ad and further refines this cost model with the new “cost per action” model (tied to a conversion?).

My thinking on the suspicions around search advertising specifically is that the search engines are most concerned with their audience than their advertisers.  Google leads this charge with its Ad Quality Score that suppresses display if the ad is deemed of low quality (read relevance) to what the searcher is looking for and this is regardless of how much an advertiser is willing to pay for position. Successful search advertising incorporates search technology developments, general search behavior as well as product enticement into construction and constant refinement into a campaign.

That is how we’re doing it for our clients here at Ascentium.