Let's quit apologizing for the internet

'What we can do is make the internet incredibly valuable to our clients by exploring all of its potential, not just what is easiest to explain or make money in the short term.'

Let's quit apologizing
for the internet

It's not TV. It's not print. We need to sell its merits.

By Kathy Sharpe

    For the last several months we in the online advertising community have been struggling with the question: What did we do wrong?
   After all these long years we are still fighting for our share of the big budget, the real money, the billions that are spent on television advertising every year.
    And, driven by the undercurrent of masochism that has been dominating our collective sub-conscious since 9/11, we have settled on blaming ourselves.
   We, the digerati, oversold, the reasoning goes.
   We promised total accountability, we promised brands in an instant, we promised the death of traditional advertising as we knew it. If we had only played it differently, been less innovative, conformed more to the norm, we’d all be very rich, or at least alright.
   So now we repent. Our new message carries none of the bombast of the Nineties.
   Now online advertising is just like television, but different. Read the columns in Media Life, check out Cathy Taylor’s piece in Media Magazine.
   The message is clear. We use impressions, we do reach, we can even do frequency, we are easy to buy and integrate into any media plan. Please, please, PLEASE buy us.
   There is something very appealing, even pragmatic about this tactic.
   If we make the internet look like television--measured in impressions--and smell like television and print--hey, frequency was never more important--then we can sell it to the same media planner who buys television and print.
   More importantly, perhaps we can get the agencies that make their commissions from multi-million dollar buys to forget how much more challenging this stuff is to plan, deliver, track and create. Then they'll let us in the game.
   Who are we kidding?
   Let’s go back to one of the original rationales for wearing the hair shirt: The reason online advertising failed is because we promised too much accountability.
   Wrong.
   The reason online advertising failed is because for the most part we limited the definition of accountability to “click-throughs.”
    In other words, we dumbed it down to the most easily visible and comprehensible metric.
    We all knew (well, most of us did) that there was a true plethora of other options we could offer clients.
    Some of us even worked with metrics that lacked the two-syllable simplicity of “click-through” and proved the real accountability of online advertising.
    Along scales of involvement we looked at cost of leads, high-, medium- and low-value customers, and follow-through to sale. We did and continue to measure response across media and countless other things.
   Driven and supported by absolutely visionary clients, that work got done.
   Now we seem about to throw it all away. Hey, the Western world lost both Aristotle and the recipe for concrete for about 700 years. So what’s a little online advertising learning? Especially when we can be “just like TV.”
    Well, it would be like forgetting the very reason we should be on a media plan in the first place.
    Online advertising brings something unique to a plan that TV and print can’t, starting with accountability on multiple metrics and continuing through a level of self-directed engagement and moving through to just simply increased value.
    Online advertising doesn’t have to be TV circa 2002, it can just be itself and we will get on the plan.
    Here’s why:

The majority of clients have the capability and the desire to measure a range of critical metrics online--way beyond click-through.
Increasingly, clients realize they can learn more about their customers online than through any other medium. This impacts every level of their business, from pricing to product development, and is yet another measure of online advertising's accountability and value.
On average Americans spend 15 percent of their time online, according to DoubleClick, so if we want to market to them we need to be where they spend their time.
Online advertising, with all its interactive components and measurability, is slowing but unstoppably moving to the TV near you.
That move of interactivity to the TV destroys what has been the real impediment to the acceptance of online advertising: ad agency media departments and their attachment to commissions on those fat TV buys.

    Online advertising was just too difficult when the ease and monetary rewards of a TV buy were just across the hall. But once the complexity in an online buy jumps appliances the stakes change.
    I can already hear the naysayers: “But it hasn’t happened yet,” “We need to find our points of similarity,” “We’ve got to grow up.”
    To some degree all of that is true, but it’s not the same as reducing what we all know to be the most complex media/selling/communication channel yet invented to the equivalent of TV.
    It doesn’t mean that we should, yet one more time, dumb ourselves down to meet the very short-term needs of a very shortsighted media planner.
    If we position online advertising as just another venue for TV advertising, or measure its results as simply as a spot buy, then when push comes to shove--or rather when budgets are getting cut-- won’t that same media planner choose the REAL TV and the actual print?
    After all, we can’t make online advertising easier to plan, or track or create, so what problem have we really solved?
    What we can do is make the internet incredibly valuable to our clients by exploring all of its potential, not just what is easiest to explain or make money in the short term.

-Kathy Sharpe is the founder and partner in Sharpe Partners, a privately owned, full-service interactive marketing agency in New York.

Printer-Friendly Version | Send to a Friend
Cover Page | Contact Us