September 12, 2007

Legends of Interactivity, Part 2

I really pissed off some net heads a few weeks ago with The Legend of Interactivity. As a matter of fact, they were so pissed off they actually interacted.

It’s amazing how vehemently zealots react when their beliefs are challenged. The major objection to "The Legend of Interactivity" was that I based my observation that interactivity on the web has been grossly exaggerated on one data point -- the number of people commenting on blogs. Well, here's some more stuff for them to get hysterical over.

We all know that the great advantage that an on-line banner (display) ad has over a magazine ad is that it is interactive, right? In other words, you can click on it and be taken somewhere where an actual buying or learning experience can occur.

Except for one thing. In about 99.8% of cases nobody clicks. (See this recent data from DoubleClick)

So all this hoo-ha about the interactivity of on-line display advertising is really about two people in a thousand.

In fact, if a magazine ad has a response mechanism that gets a 1% response rate, it will be five times as effectively interactive as the average on-line display ad.

Any traditional direct response advertiser that has a response rate of one-fifth of one percent will be bankrupt in about fifteen minutes.

Okay, net heads, let’s have it.

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