Online advertising spend is set to surpass that of television this year.
But is social media set to kill the online party?
The problem is consumers have become more interested in each others opinion and less interested in what brands have to say.
Meanwhile, we’ve seen the old school media moguls snap up new online assets, but will they ultimately be worth the megabucks they are paying for them?
Social network owners are still struggling with what they call the monetisation issue.
Their sites attract massive audiences, yet there is no clear way of turning them into massive amounts of cash. The standard solution of selling targeted banner advertising space on their sites is floundering.
Despite brands deploying increasingly sophisticated creative and media owners offering better targeting, too few of us are clicking on the banner ads to make the ROI numbers add up for the brands.
Some will say that online advertising should not be judged solely on click-though rates but on the effect it has on consumer awareness, a much harder metric to measure.
What the online industry needs to do is drop the word ‘advertising’, or at least what it traditionally stands for. “Advertising’ is a bad word in many consumers’ minds. Too many lies have been told in its name.
Net savvy consumers will not take anything at face value. Trust is only gained from peer referral and recommendation. Brands have to engage with the social networks to earn trust, not just use them as billboards.
Effective marking online is about facilitating two-way conversations, not creating one-way broadcasts. The traditional advertising model is too clumsy to work online in this way. Online, the less a marketing campaign looks like advertising the more effective it is.
So if buying space and pasting ‘buy-this-from-us’ messages in it is becoming outmoded, where does this leave the online media owners?
They’ll have to think of clever ways to sell brands exposure to their captive audiences. And here is the real rub – without annoying their users so much they leave.
Google is possibly the only significant online media owner to get this right by offering an advertising service that is instigated by users who are actively looking for products and services.
Social networking may indeed kill the traditional advertising model online, but not advertising per se. Clever brands will move their so-called ‘above the line’ media budgets to ‘below the line’ activity.
Essentially, by using the free media space of social networks, email and organic search to distribute their marketing messages, brands can focus their budgets on creating subtle non-intrusive ways to gain new customers and more importantly advocates for their products.
* Chris is head of digital at WAA. waa.co.uk. E-mail chris.tomlinson@waa.co.uk.
