|
|
 |
| Home > Writings > Stories > Rants, Journalism, Feeble Attempts at Humour |
Previous
|
|
| Online Advertising - A tale of the Internet |
A look inside online advertising about as useful as Jonah's guide to the insides of whales. In other words, a highly personal and emotional view, one not necessary backed by any science or analysis.
You didn't come here to learn what everyone else knows about online advertising, did you? If you did, you better skip right to the links at the bottom of this page.
The rest of you, read on. You're in for a quaint, chaotic, slightly eccentric and very opinionated view of the collision between the two planets, "advertising" and "the internet".
From the start, advertisers were behind the eight ball on a pool table with no side cushions.
The internet arose from an academic, not-for-profit base after it was developed by the US military as an experiment to test the utility of a distributed communications network -- one that would have no central hub, therefore less vulnerable to attack.
They brought it to proof of concept, then gave it to the universities, thinking "cute idea, but let's move on to more 'important' things".
Tim Berners Lee invented the world wide web in the early 1990s by scaling up his own personal filing system to a global system and writing some languages that could be read by any computer.
So far -- no sign of Coke, corporates or online advertising.
|
A friend of ours came by in 1994 to give us some business advice. He was from a CRC at UQ looking at new media. We asked him what was the next big thing. He said: "Have you heard about this thing called the world wide web".
Soon after, we were given an an internet connection by Pegasus so that we could make a video of their 60 page internet set up manual. Yes, you could get online, but in those days it wasn't easy.
Word got out that we knew something about this "Internet" thing.
When friends of ours working at Brisbane City Council looked online they found the top 50 results in Infoseek search engine were for Brisbane California, a town of 2000. Quick, make us some web sites, they said. What about? we asked. About Brisbane, of course!
And so ToadShow looked after the publication of Brisbane Stories, a collection of half a dozen sites arising from cultural projects done by Council's Community Life division.
This was back in the day when the most popular place on the net was Yahoo's Cool Sites (the ones with Ray Bans).
In 1998 Digital Computing payed $3 million to the company who owned the name (and domain) of their search engine Alta Vista, which had suddenly become the world's most popular. Ooops. Should have secured that domain earlier.
Search engines were popping up all over the place. HotBot, Northern Light, AllTheWeb. Banner advertising was the next big thing. It would bring that ROI the web was waiting for (Return On Investment.) Amazon was getting some competition from Barnes and Noble.
Spam was just beginning. Viagra was an age away.
|
| Banner ads - the saviour? | |
No. They were an obviously stupid idea promoted by people who had never actually bought any online advertising but had the weird idea that other people were just desperate to get a bit of their screen real estate.
Will online advertising ever work? Well, no. It's a contradiction in terms. Online means access to information -- advertising means a tightly controlled, crafted message insulated from other information including detractors. The medium cannot on one hand give you the freedom to gather any information you want and other the other hand captivate you with an isolated persuasive stream.
The One Show Interactive is a book (note the dead trees paradigm still working) that features a collection of award winning online advertising web sites. To me, they seem as though they are in denial. They take over your browser, they have load times, there is a long wait between sections, information is scant and tightly controlled, they are all style and little substance. See them once (if you have the patience) but why see them again? In many ways they are trying to punch an old media paradign through a new media window.
|
| E Business – going gangbusters | |
On the other hand, online communication, e-business and the ecommerce are going gangbusters. This is where product web sites are crafted with a cunning agenda. That is:
1. Do good things.
2. Tell people about them.
On the internet, you can't hide. An assertion that your product will "save the whales", "cover bald spots" and "improve your sex life" just won't cut it when all the user has to do is type your product name into Google for a thousand articles on how spammy, scammy and empty your assertions are.
|
| Case Study: Kitchener Wine Cabinets | |
Anthony Kitchener had a good business, selling about five wine cabinets a week in summer, about three in winter at an average of $3000 each. His brother Gerard and he had created the wine cabinet business after Gerard hit his head once too many times entering the cellar under his parents’ house in Melbourne. Anthony had a business designing and manufacturing air compressors, and knew a bit about relative humidity, so it wasn’t a long stretch to making large, temperature and humidity controlled boxes for storing wine. At half the price per bottle storage of their competitors, and the only one made for Australian conditions, they had excellent prospects.
ToadShow proposed a web site would double their sales within 6 months. As it turned out the web site doubled sales in one month, removed the necessity for printed brochures and became a conduit for online orders averaging at 7 a week. The total throughput is now 12 a week in summer, 8 a week in winter. KWC became a viable online business. E-commerce? Hell no. Anthony gets the order, ships the unit, and encloses the invoice with the unit, asking people to pay by cheque. No credit card fees, no deposit required. So far no one has defaulted on payment. A clear case of do a good thing, tell people about it.
|
| Online Discussion — Build it and they will stay away. | |
No matter how many times I say this, people just won’t listen. We need interactivity, they say. Our response is, “with all due respect, you need writers, artists, editors, photographers and something to say.” This seems too hard for most people, and certainly sounds way too expensive. Can’t we just have an online discussion. That way people can create the content for each other.
Online discussion for hobbies like dirt biking or unix nerds are fine. They arise out of the communities themselves and have a natural reason for being.
Offering interactivity to an audience not used to it, and moreover not demanding it, is an exercise in futility.
Instead, we create opportunities for users to email feedback, which they are much more comfortable with. The email is then converted in to a question and answer style item.
|
One case where ToadShow helped an organisation establish a presence online was http://www.aesuper.net.au/ Australian Enterprise Superannuation (AES). This was a small superannuation fund that had a lean administration and good returns on investment. It therefore had a good story to tell. Its competitive advantage was a lower than standard administration fee. In other words, it cost less to be in this Super fund than most others. It was successful, so why have a web site? The answer -- to reassure its members that they were on a good thing.
To do this, AES needed to not only have a web site, but to appear at the top of the list with the phrase "Australian Retirement Fund" which was not only a useful description of their business, but also happened to be the name of one of their competitors.
At ToadShow we knew that there was no secret shortcut to ranking highly. It was a matter of having high value, useful relevant content. This attracts people whose visits are recorded as referrals. This makes a site popular. Popularity makes your site go up the rankings in the search engines. So we make about 1600 pages with relevant content, and provided some genuinely useful functionality, like a household budget and savings calculator.
Persuasion - it's being studied, but is it happening? Why is it that if you want to find out anything about "online advertising" all you can find is books? There are plenty of semi-academic / business reference treatises out there made from dead trees. Why? Because you can sell dead trees. Selling banner ads? That's harder.
The truth is, if it's online it's free. Because if you charge, someone else is going to pop up with the same product for less, or free, so they can capture your audience.
|
| Why did people switch from Yahoo to Google? | |
Because of the ads. Suddenly Yahoo started looking like a rally car on the outback safari - plastered with ads, slogans crammed into every available pixel.
Google was fast, simple, and ad free. They flocked. Now Google has twice to three times as many searches as Yahoo (Jan 2006).
|
| Case Study: Great South East, Coast to Coast, Queensland Weekender (Channel 7 Brisbane) | |
David Franken, Program Manager at Channel 7, came to ToadShow and said "I want to be the Yahoo of the Great South East". That's the sort of guy David Franken is.
He knew that if you could provide a comprehensive well organised directory of things to do and see in South East Queensland, he could "brand" South East Queensland with Channel Seven, in much the same way that he "branded" the Brisbane River by painting the Brisbane Ferries in Channel 7 logos and messages.
It worked. It cost a bit, because it involved a lot of desk research, but it worked. The web site launched with a critical mass of content that catapulted it to number one. After that, each weekend produced an average of 10 TV stories which were webbed up with pictures, vital info, and links. The TV stories, over time, accumulated to *become* the Yahoo of SEQ, replacing that original desk research, which was archived. The branding was complete.
|
| The Internet and Politics | |
Australia lags behind the US in utilising online media. We can only deliver more or less what people ask of us (usually more) because you can only understand something relative to something you already understand. To Australian political parties in 1995, the internet was utterly incomprehensible in campaigning terms. Why would you bother publishing on the net? Who really wants to spend any effort changing the votes of 18 computer nerds?
How things have changed.
The ALP has always been in advance of the Coalition in online activity. In the last State Election, the ALP commissioned ToadShow to produce a completely interactive, membership based campaigning tool called Team Beattie. Its message was:
"Now there is a hands on way to show your support for Queensland and help get things done" - Join Team Beattie.
Team Beattie was a tool designed to gather an "email tree" of supporters who could be swiftly mobilised. They were the supporters who joined Team Beattie and registered for updates. It has become a continuous campaigning tool.
It is minimally interactive, but it has a lot of useful, relevant features. It has "tell a friend", it is kept current (five stories were posted on Friday September 10). TV and radio ads are available in the Multimedia section. So while it's not an advertising web site in itself, it's certainly a campaign tool. The site has policies. Not assertions – just the stuff. Yours to read, or ignore, but you can't ignore the navigation point "Policies" which speaks volumes. The site has genuinely useful information about 89 electorates and ties each electorate page to the Labor candidate. It declares itself, and provides its information responsibly. Come the next election round about 2007, it will crank up again and deliver the 2007 key lines and themes.
|
One truly revolutionary innovation that came with the web was shareware. Shareware is a product you can freely copy and distribute. If you like it, send in a small fee, which entitles you to free upgrades and technical support. Try before you buy caught on — big time. Now It's the standard. Even major software houses have 30 day trials, very few of which are crippleware.
|
| The all-singing all-dancing CD ROM | |
The ASADCDROM was never a go, really. It was another corporate product destined to be stored on the shelves behind your design for 18 months, until iit was thrown away in a clean out, because you had no idea where it came from. This is because there was no existing practice of watching CD Roms. There were a few encyclopaedias before the web matured, but since the web has delivered the world’s biggest reference library, CD ROMs sort of lost their punch.
|
| Where does this all leave us? | |
The internet is new. Advertising is old. If you can renew advertising with ideas that match the internet itself for innovation, and truly understand what the online experience is all about, you might have a chance.
If you can't come up with a genuinely "internet-based" take on advertising, well, there's always the good old CD ROM.
|
| |
|
|
