Industry Arrives at a Consensus on Online Advertising

I paraphrase from multiple sources but most creative work sucks too many consumers are installing blockers rather than put up with being interruptedhaving their phone batteries drained advertisers have worked out that agencies and Ad Tech businesses are siphoning money off all over the place noone believes the dataamp160and publishers are losing their shirtsNot a pretty picture Even if you39re Google or Facebook you can39t be happy with the situation If things don39t improve it doesn39t bode well for the future even for themOf course online communications including advertising has great potential it39s just that we seem not to have worked out how to unleash itYou can trace what has been a series of missteps back to the notsogood old days when clients didn39t bother themselves with the media side of the business That might have been sort of understandable when the ad agencies housing the media people didn39t bother either but once media agencies got going this client indifference was always going to be exploitedOne way was to focus on the buy prices Lower those and the client was happy and anyway all mainstream media were largely acceptable even interchangeable if you limited yourself to looking at the numbers so who knew or even cared if the agency made money on the side by pushing budgets in this or that directionThen there39s the evolution of the sales side Media people in agencies have always had a builtin bullshit filter that activates when they meet sales peopleamp160The bullshit filter might have worked well when most agency media people knew most sales guys but things have changed For one thing salesmen now regularly meet clients and not just for a handshake and lunch Now they talk business they form partnerships they gasp go around the agencySecondly since the media world exploded and we all started talking digital gobbledegook the BS filter gets clogged and all sorts of rubbish gets through and all sorts of good stuff gets blocked when that happensThen there39s the ads Sad to say they39ve become ludicrously irrelevant the province of the luddite creatives those guys who always used to be mocked for going to Cannes amp160that is until the Ad Tech people turned Cannes from an ad festival into a tedious trade fairFar too many digital guys have little idea what the ads they39re placing even look likeBut what they do understand is numbers And the bigger the betterOn the commercial side of things the large holding companies have long worked out that their continued future success lies with the media quotmathmenquotMedia agencies39 trading arms duly forget the ads focus on turning largely meaningless numbers into cash and voila amp160Here we areJust in time clients have woken up Credit to troublemakers like Jon Mandel the WFA the ANA ISBA The AdContrarian ID Comms Nick Manning and the rest for shaking the trees Somebody had to do it and it wasn39t ever going to be the large network agenciesClients needed to reclaim their primacy and there are signs they are at last starting to do so Mind you one wellknown digital expert has posted that Marc Pritchard39s IAB speech was designed with only one thing in mind to get better prices for PampampG on FBThere39s always one the truth is the gravy train has hit the buffersTo switch metaphors when you39re in a hole first stop digging then start to clamber out Time for the men with the ladders and a planClick the social buttons above or below to share this story with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this article are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated bloggers

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Industry Arrives at a Consensus on Online Advertising

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Brian Jacobs

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Industry Arrives at a Consensus on Online Advertising

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