The Biggest Advertising Opportunity Ever

How would you like to be the next Steve Jobs? The opportunity is sitting out there waiting to be taken.

All you have to do is find an effective advertising use for the web. It's that simple.

The web is an enormously powerful medium, but no one has figured out how to make it a great advertising medium. It's as if TV existed for 20 years and no one had invented the TV spot.

We have all kinds of lousy ways to use the web, but no reliably effective way.

An article in Digiday this week entitled Banner Ad’s Creators Dismayed By Its Current State laments the condition of display advertising. Display is the dominant form of web advertising. Despite a growth rate of 20% this year and almost $20 billion in sales, no one seems to be satisfied with banner advertising.

"Publishers in particular rue how commoditized it has become in a sea of 5.3 trillion annual impressions. Advertisers and agencies lament the lack of creativity typically given banners, which some see as on their way to becoming a purely direct-response tool,"

Worst of all is consumer reaction -- universal disregard. I have never once heard two people talk about a display ad. It is the one and only form of advertising that I can say this about.

But banners are only the most obvious failure.

The reason it's so clear that banners are a dud is that they are easily measurable. Every form of online advertising that can be easily measured has been exposed -- banners, podcasts, QR codes, blogs...

The only forms that are still retaining their cred are the ones that are not so easily measurable, like social media and content. This is not because they are any more effective, it's just that it's a lot more difficult to prove their ineffectuality.

This allows the online ad industry and web zealots to pretend that their ideological commitment to these modes has a basis in real world success. But this is a fantasy.

The web is almost 20 years old and the ad industry has still not figured it out. Maybe it will be like the telephone -- a universally used medium for which a brilliant advertising purpose will never be discovered.

Frankly, I doubt it. Someone is going to figure out how to use the web wonderfully. It might as well be you.


Follow-up:
If you read the comments below, you'll see what an idiot I am. Vinny Warren clears away the weeds. Someone has already figured out advertising on the web and made zillions -- Google. Doh.

Success Is Never Final

We like to think that history has an inevitability to it. We like to believe that there is an arc that goes from the bad old days to the good new days; that things move toward virtue; that freedom and prosperity will inevitably triumph and evil and depredation will ultimately be vanquished.

There is absolutely no reason to believe this. And yet we do.

It's the same type of silly belief we have about evolution. We believe that the purpose of evolution was to lead to a grand conclusion -- us. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are just the result of thousands of little contingencies. The world existed for 4 billion years very nicely without us, thank you.

Winston Churchill came as close as any one individual ever came to saving the world. Without him, the Nazis and their pals might very well have won WW II.

He was hailed as a hero. But was promptly evicted from office when his party lost the elections in 1945.

But Churchill was a realist. He said, "Success is never final."

The point is this -- you never know. You think you know, but you don't.

How else can you explain the astounding failure of Ron Johnson as ceo of JCPenney? Johnson was fired yesterday.

You couldn't possibly draw up a better candidate to lead that company. He had a bachelor's degree from Stanford in economics, an MBA from Harvard, he lead Target out of the dark ages, and headed up the most successful retail juggernaut in the history of retail juggernauts -- the Apple stores.

And yet his 17-month tenure at JCPenney was a disaster of unprecedented proportions. According to Business Insider, Penney's performance in the 4th quarter of last year was "probably the worst quarterly performance ever in the history of major retail."

Johnson took everything he learned at Stanford and Harvard and Target and Apple and applied it to JCPenney. And it was a catastrophe.

Success is always contingent. It has to do with where you are, who you are with, what the circumstances happen to be, and which way the wind is blowing.

The people who speak at conferences and write blogs and books and think they know something universal about advertising and marketing are all full of shit. What they know is what worked at one particular moment, at one particular place, under one particular set of circumstances.

To believe that anything about business, or any other human endeavor for that matter, is universally true or all-embracing is a philosophy for fools and a prescription for failure.

The Hidden Danger Of Precision Targeting

There is very little difference between your customer and your competitor’s customer.

And get ready for a shock. To them there is very little difference between you and your competitor.

Most consumers are oblivious to the positioning subtleties among major brands. The average consumer has no idea why Coke is different from Pepsi, or Crest is different from Colgate. They see no difference between Jif and Skippy. They are unimpressed and uninformed about the arcane positioning distinctions between Bounty and Brawny paper towels.

Most of their purchasing habits are just that -- habits. Interpreting their behavior as some sort of ideological commitment to your brand is a delusion.

In fact, most of the positioning and differentiation work done by advertisers and marketers are academic exercises that are lost on consumers. Consumers have more important things on their mind.

This is why trying to draw precise targeting differences and grand strategic insights between your buyers and your competitor's buyers is such a fruitless endeavor. Being too precise in your targeting means you are missing one of your biggest prospects – your competitor’s customer.

Heavy users in your category are promiscuous. They may have a favorite brand, but they are generally not fiercely brand loyal.

Advertising vehicles that allow you to “engage” and have “conversations” with your brand's heavy users by promising precision targeting provide very limited opportunity to grow your business. In fact, they often distract you from your proper objective – attracting new customers.

This is why social media have proven to be highly suspect in building sales. Who follows you on Facebook and Twitter? They are mainly your committed customers. They are not your primary source of growth. Should you ignore them? Of course not. But neither should you be obsessed with them, as is common practice in the world of social media.

One of the great benefits of mass media is that it lacks precision targeting. It reaches all the users in your category, including the users of your competitor's brand.

These people – the ones who are not your loyal fans – are the ones who can grow your business.