I just ran into an intersting post by Vidsense CEO Jaffer Ali entitled “Has Online Advertising Lost Its “Schwerpunkt”?”. Its premise : “Creativity and strategic thinking and planning have become subservient to technology under the guise of analytics.” Part of his evidence includes the how marketers evaluate advertising agencies:
In 2005, those marketers surveyed listed the order of qualities they looked for in their agencies:
1. Quality of Creative Content
2. Price/Cost
3. Innovation and Strategic value
4. Traditional print, offline services
5. Sophisticated analytics/measurement
6. Proficiency in emerging/interactiveIn 2008 the results of the same survey were quite different:
1. Sophisticated analytics/measurement
2. Proficiency in emerging/interactive
3. Price/Cost
4. Quality of creative (virtual tie with price/cost)
5. Traditional print, etc.
6. Innovation and Strategic value
It’s a bit of a curmudgeonly piece, but it rings true. In the heat of web analyitics, we sometimes forget that attention isn’t just a commodity, but represent real human beings exercising free will. Nice to see this coming from someone who sells ads on a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) basis.
The Noisy Channel 
2 replies on “Has Online Advertising Lost Its Schwerpunkt?”
Companies seem to ignore the single largest online branding/advertising venue available: their own regular external emails. Why not use these emails to market the senders company?
You have a website.
You send emails.
Why not multiply your sales-staff by “wrapping” the regular email in an interactive letterhead?
No other marketing or advertising medium is as targeted as an email between people that know each other (as opposed to mass emails). These emails are always read and typically kept.
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An interesting idea, and hopefully one that is bringing you good business. But, at least to my taste, it violates a line between communication and advertising. Then again, I’m not a sales guy.
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