Wednesday, December 31, 2008

The End of Brand Advertising?

Is there a place for brand advertising online? Of course there is. But Alex Rampell, CEO of TrialPay doesn’t seem to think so.

He recently wrote an article suggesting falling ad rates mean the era of brand advertising is coming to an end.

Pointing out that online media offers the ability to measure click throughs on a real-time basis, it’s easy to quantify performance.

In the good old days of performance-less advertising, engagement didn’t really matter because you generally couldn’t quantify it. Studies on Reach, Frequency, and Recall aside, General Motors had no way of measuring the marginal benefit (much less revenue!) of a particular advertisement. But on the internet, it is quite clear that if nobody is clicking on your ad, then nobody is noticing it, much less “connecting” with it.

That’s all true, however branding itself hasn’t changed. It’s just a change in the media we buy. Now, instead of advertising in newspapers and magazines nobody reads anymore, brands are putting more money into online media.

But just because you can measure click throughs doesn’t make it the most relevant metric. Does a click – or a lack of a click – mean anything in a branding campaign? I might see an ad for BMW on Yahoo’s front page, but if I don’t click on the ad, does that mean the ad has no impact on me?

I’d like to think I’m immune to advertising, but I doubt that I am. While I may not be in the market for a car, I probably will one day – so I don’t think BMW wasted its money just because I didn’t click.

No need to belabor the point. One of the comments to Alex’s post pretty much summed up my view:

Branding is about building an expectation. i.e., Walmart - cheap stuff. Apple - cool stuff. Mazda - fun stuff. Target - cheap chic. These are companies that have done a good job telling you what to expect and then delivering on their promise. They are branders. it doesn’t matter whether they use their buying/product experience, television, radio, the Internet, print - they know who they are and how to deliver. The Internet is just as strong a branding tool as television - you just execute differently. And if you think a “click through” is a measure of success, you are naive, ill-informed, stupid or all three.

I concur – except for that last part, of course. Come on, the election year is over. Can’t we get back to rational discourse again?

Posted by Richard Bloch

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