Is advertising failing on the Internet?
Writing at TechCrunch, Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, puts forth the thesis “that the internet is not replacing advertising but shattering it”. It is a provocative article and attracting some attention. For example, Clemons says:
It is frequently argued that the advertising industry will provide sufficient innovation to replace the loss of traditional ads on traditional mass media. Again, my basic premise rejects this, suggesting that simple commercial messages, pushed through whatever medium, in order to reach a potential customer who is in the middle of doing something else, will fail. It’s not that we no longer need information to initiate or to complete a transaction; rather, we will no longer need advertising to obtain that information. We will see the information we want, when we want it, from sources that we trust more than paid advertising. We will find out what we need to know, when we want to make a commercial transaction of any kind. The conventional wisdom is that this is exactly what paid search helps us to do, but all too often they are nothing more than a form of misdirection, as I explain further below. Instead, we will use information that we trust, obtained at the time that we want to see it.
Over at Search Engine Land, search guru Danny Sullivan is livid. He makes it clear in no uncertain terms that he thinks the article by Clemons is bunk. He takes particular umbrage at Professor Clemons calling search ads “misdirection.”
I don’t know about search ads but I do know that I heartily detest many of the techniques used to shove advertising in my face on Web pages. One particularly irritating method is the so-called IntelliTXT that I sounded off about in a previous post. I continue to be puzzled why advertisers think that really annoying you is a way to sell things. One of the things I like about the Firefox browser is extensions like NoScript and Adblock Plus that shut the pestiferous ads out. I am aware that Web sites have to get paid for somehow but pushing ads right in my face is not the way.
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