Guess who said this? "The advertising business is going down the drain...

Guess who said this? "The advertising business is going down the drain...

...It's being pulled down by the people who create it, who don't know how to sell anything, who have never sold anything in their lives , who despise selling, whose mission in life is to be clever show-offs and con clients into giving them money to display originality and genius."


Believe it or not, that quote comes from advertising icon David Ogilvy. And

that was before the World Wide Web was invented.

But remember, he wasn't talking about Interactive Communication!

Click Fraud

Martin Fleischmann put his faith in online advertising.

He used it to build his Atlanta company, MostChoice.com, which offers consumers

rate quotes and other information on insurance and mortgages. Last year he paid

Yahoo! Inc. and Google Inc. a total of $2 million in advertising fees. The 40-year-old entrepreneur

believed the celebrated promise of Internet marketing: You pay only when

prospective customers click on your ads.

Now, Fleischmann's faith has been shaken. Over the past three years, he

has noticed a growing number of puzzling clicks coming from such places as

Botswana, Mongolia, and Syria. This seemed strange, since MostChoice steers

customers to insurance and mortgage brokers only in the U.S

Fleischmann is a victim of click fraud: a dizzying collection of scams and

deceptions that inflate advertising bills for thousands of companies of all

sizes. The spreading scourge poses the single biggest threat to the Internet's

advertising gold mine and is the most nettlesome question facing Google and

Yahoo, whose digital empires depend on all that gold.

The growing ranks of businesspeople worried about click fraud typically

have no complaint about versions of their ads that appear on actual Google or

Yahoo Web pages, often next to search results. The trouble arises when the

Internet giants boost their profits by recycling ads to millions of other sites,

ranging from the familiar, such as cnn.com, to dummy Web addresses like

insurance1472.com, which display lists of ads and little if anything else. When

somebody clicks on these recycled ads, marketers such as MostChoice get billed,

sometimes even if the clicks appear to come from Mongolia. Google or Yahoo then

share the revenue with a daisy chain of Web site hosts and operators. A penny or

so even trickles down to the lowly clickers. That means Google and Yahoo at

times passively profit from click fraud and, in theory, have an incentive to

tolerate it. So do smaller search engines and marketing networks that similarly

recycle ads.

SLIPPING CONFIDENCE

Google and Yahoo say they filter out most questionable clicks and either

don't charge for them or reimburse advertisers that have been wrongly billed.

That confidence may be slipping. A BusinessWeek investigation has revealed a

thriving click-fraud underground populated by swarms of small-time players,

making detection difficult. "Paid to read" rings with hundreds or thousands of

members each, all of them pressing PC mice over and over in living rooms and

dens around the world. In some cases, "clickbot" software generates page hits

automatically and anonymously. Participants from Kentucky to China speak of

making from $25 to several thousand dollars a month apiece, cash they wouldn't

receive if Google and Yahoo were as successful at blocking fraud as they

claim. "It's not that much different from someone coming up and taking money out

of your wallet," says David Struck. He and his wife, Renee, both 35, say they

dabbled in click fraud last year, making more than $5,000 in four months.

Employing a common scheme, the McGregor (Minn.) couple set up dummy Web sites

filled with nothing but recycled Google and Yahoo advertisements. Then they paid

others small amounts to visit the sites, where it was understood they would

click away on the ads, says David Struck. It was "way too easy," he adds.

Gradually, he says, he and his wife began to realize they were cheating

unwitting advertisers, so they stopped. "Whatever Google and Yahoo are doing [to

stop fraud], it's not having much of an effect," he says.

Spending on Internet ads is growing faster than any other sector of the

advertising industry and is expected to surge from $12.5 billion last year to

$29 billion in 2010 in the U.S. alone, according to researcher eMarketer Inc.

About half of these dollars are going into deals requiring advertisers to pay by

the click. Most other Internet ads are priced according to "impressions," or how

many people view them.

Google and Yahoo are grabbing billions of dollars once collected by

traditional print and broadcast outlets, based partly on the assumption that

clicks are a reliable, quantifiable measure of consumer interest that the older

media simply can't match. But the huge influx of cash for online ads has

attracted armies of con artists whose activities are eroding that crucial

assumption and could eat into the optimistic expectations for online

advertising. (Advertisers generally don't grumble about fraudulent clicks coming

from the Web sites of traditional media outlets. But there are growing concerns

about these media sites exaggerating how many visitors they have -- the online

version of inflating circulation.)

Most academics and consultants who study online advertising estimate that

10% to 15% of ad clicks are fake, representing roughly $1 billion in annual

billings. Usually the search engines divide these proceeds with several players:

First, there are intermediaries known as "domain parking" companies, to which

the search engines redistribute their ads. Domain parkers host "parked" Web

sites, many of which are those dummy sites containing only ads. Cheats who own

parked sites obtain search-engine ads from the domain parkers and arrange for

the ads to be clicked on, triggering bills to advertisers. In all, $300 million

to $500 million a year could be flowing to the click-fraud

　

Clutter...

Clutter. That dreadful word that came into vogue in the late 1960s and was applied to the proliferation of advertising messages the consumer could be exposed to during the course of his or her working day. More accurately the term was "commercial clutter", however we much prefer "meaningless noise"

Now, if you could sort that little problem then you really would be well on the way to advertising brilliance!

Another way of achieving brilliance in advertising is to actively encourage interactive television on current terrestrial TV formats.

This form of interactive communication dramatically alters the way the viewers perceive the commercials, instead of being seen as an interruption the commercials now become a meaningful source of information (a form of programming) and thus are watched in a totally different way.

Presenting advertising within this format allows the most dramatic evolution of advertising itself. This renaissance in this period of the ongoing history of advertising will be know as advertising by true, accurate, more predictable, instant and measurable results.

Clients will pay only by results. The interactive nature of the new technology will allow research to measure the results and present these results as a post-evaluation of their participation. Clients will then pay for participation based upon these evaluations.

And that’s when you will have achieved advertising brilliance!

Understanding Interactive Marketing Communication.

Defining Interactive Marketing.

Interaction can be defined simply as straightforward communication between two parties.

Presently we are in danger of losing the real meaning of interaction, as we tend to focus discussions on the emerging technologies and neglect the communication process itself.

With an understanding of the real meaning of Interactive Communication, existing media can be made interactive, and subsequently far more cost effective.
Interactive Marketing Communication turns passive advertising into active advertising and actually alters behaviour during the communication and learning process.

Contact Paul Ashby at: paul.ashby@yahoo.com

MEANWHILE IN AMERICAN...

TV ADS ARE LESS EFFECTIVE THAN TWO YEARS AGO

NEW YORK: A majority of US marketers believe that television advertising has become less effective over the past two years, spurring interest in exploring new ad and video commercial formats.

That's the conclusion of the fourth biennial TV & Technology survey conducted by the Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research.

Among the study's main findings ...

* Sixty-two percent of marketers believe TV advertising has become less effective in the past two years, but close to half of the advertisers surveyed have already started to experiment with new ad types to work with DVRs and VOD programs.

* Eighty-seven percent of advertisers believe branded entertainment will play a stronger role in TV advertising in the coming year.
* Advertisers are eager to try new ad formats, including ads in online TV shows (65 percent), ads embedded in VOD (55 percent), interactive television ads (43 percent), and ads within the set top box menu (32 percent).
* Over 50 percent of marketers reported that when half of all TV households use DVRs, they will cut spending on TV advertising by 12 percent.
* Eighty-seven percent of respondents said they intend to spend more on Web advertising this year.
* Seventy-two percent of marketers are very interested in having individual commercial ratings rather than average commercial ratings.

"As marketers embrace the richness of new advertising avenues outside of the traditional TV format, the TV industry is working to address marketer's issues related to ratings and the changing TV landscape,”"said ANA president/C.E.O. Bob Liodice.

"Marketers, in collaboration with the TV industry, will continue to find the most effective and innovative ways to reach their customers through the TV medium, utilising the emerging technologies available to them."

Additional insights from the study...

* Two-thirds of respondents indicate that C-level executives are watching the changes in TV advertising more closely, up from 54 percent two years ago.
* Media agencies have vastly improved their ability to help their clients deal with the changes. Only 28 percent of respondents reported that their media agency is ill equipped to address the changes in TV advertising, compared to 47 percent two years ago.
* Creative agencies did not fare as well, with 47 percent of marketers indicating that their creative agency was still ill-equipped to help deal with changes, a slight improvement from 55 percent of marketers two years ago.

The study was conducted in January 2008 and is based on a survey of 78 leading advertisers, across all major industries and categories.


Meanwhile back in America, research indicates that consumers now rely less and less on marketing messages when in buying mode whilst another key factor is the proliferation of media choice has consigned the notion of a captive audience to the rubbish bin.

ACCOUNTABILITY & ADVERTISING!

In my opinion there is ample justification for questioning a major advertising pretension that it does, indeed, work at all!

All human knowledge is provisional but it is also incremental, the sum of what we know to day is far greater than thirty years ago – with, possibly, the sole exception of marketing/advertising.

It is more than possible that people may look back on the six or seven years either side of 2000 as a period of aberration, when advertising people temporarily became obsessed with technology. And forgot that the most intoxicating thing in human existence is our ability to communicate face to face. In fact to INTERACT!

Advertising Agencies rushed into broadcast television and, more recently the Internet, the reason for this has nothing to do with advertising effectiveness, but all to do with economic imperatives. After all agencies tend to nurture their own illusions.

Similarly it is always possible to face up to any problem simply by fixating on fictional evidence, i.e. "Advertising works"

In to days over informed world (better known as clutter), magazines for example have much going for them…

1. Magazines are actively purchased
2. Magazines are technology-proof. They are very portable, they require no electricity – you can take them anywhere an iPod would go. And a lovely expression I came across the other day "bed, bog, bath…very flexible.
3. Ads add value. In the US it has been established that advertising is an integral part of every magazine.
4. Magazines offer engagement.
5.Better still magazines can effectively INTERACT with television!

Print isn't dead, however judging from the poor quality of creative emanating from agencies these days perhaps "Advertising Agencies are dead"!

Most certainly they lack an understanding of the word "Communication"

If I were Grade I, in turn, would say to Accountant turned Adman Sorrell,

"Well mate the problems with commercial television are firmly in your court, you have, slavishly, stuck to the 30-second format without any new thinking emerging about the commercial break and the fact that viewers are turning away from the, what I understand is called, "The interruption model of advertising".

"Also there is absolutely no accountability so now your Clients appear to be turning away from Terrestrial TV and are now being advised by the Advertising Industry to go onto the Internet. A totally unproven medium, and, from everything I have learned, a medium that is very hostile to the whole concept of one-way advertising"!

"So when are you going to address all these little issues mate"?

Then accountant turned Adman Sorrell would most likely reply, "What about your viewers being ripped off all the time with Commercial Televisions' not so little scams with Premium Rate telephone call-in Games…scams that are likely to amount to several million pounds"?

INTERACTIVE COMMUNICATION COULD SOLVE ALL THESE PROBLEMS RIGHT NOW!