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The Web is about Buying, not Selling
By Martin English | March 18, 2008
In Matt Creamer’s essay in Advertising Age, “Think Different: Maybe the Web’s Not a Place to Stick Your Ads, he uses Apple as an example of a company that devotes only a small fraction of its marketing budget to “advertising” online. As Creamer also notes, Apple clearly doesn’t suffer from a lack of exposure online. In many cases, the sites on which it would advertise have far less traffic than Apple web properties attract.
This…is a call to give some thought to a question that’s not asked enough about the Internet: Should it even be viewed as an ad medium? After all, in some quarters of the broader marketing world, the habit of looking at advertising as the most important tool in the marketers’ toolbox is undergoing intense interrogation. Consider the growth of the word-of-mouth marketing business, premised on the notion that people not corporations who help other people make consumer decisions. Or look at the growing importance put on public relations and customer-relationship management both in marketing circles and even in the c-suite. The same conversation should be going on around the Internet. Trends like those listed suggest the possibility of a post-advertising age, a not-too-distant future where consumers will no longer be treated as subjects to be brainwashed with endless repetitions of whatever messaging some focus group liked. That world isn’t about hidden persuasion, but about transparency and dialogue and at its center is that supreme force of consumer empowerment, the Internet.
Rex Hammock sums it up with a quote from Jakob Nielsen: “The basic point about the web is that it is not an advertising medium. The web is not a selling medium; it is a buying medium. It is user-controlled, so the user controls, the user experiences.”
According to Rex (and I agree), that it’s an echo of what The Cluetrain Manifesto articulated and ten years ago. However, it is disappointing that the marketer are still confusing advertising & selling with conversations about products and services. It’s a buying medium, not a selling medium.
Topics: Productivity, Technology, Web / Web 2.0 |
