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This is an edited version of an article. Where text has been deleted, you will see "..." substituted. Click on the headline link to read the original article.
Published: February 18, 2009
ShortTail's David Payne never met a click-through he liked. In a paradigm where a click has come to signify the success or failure of an online campaign, Payne and his fellow online advertising colleagues have complete solidarity. Click-through is a false metric; it's simply a means to push the price of a campaign down. What other type of media drives consumers away from the content they're viewing to something else.
Elizabeth Blair, Brand.net CEO, concurs. The click isn't actually driving the sale of an item. In the brand incentive industry, she says, 89% of what's being sold is not sold online. So, if you're trying to get a consumer to buy something, something that's going to be purchased offline most of the time, clicking is the worst indicator of whether that item will be purchased.
But the real question that needs to be asked and answered as digital media takes its rightful place in the world of Madison Avenue is: What metric works for online? First, what is the marketer's objective for the product. What exactly is being sold? How can an Internet campaign sell more of that product? Finally, how can the campaign's results be measured to see that the job's been done successfully.
The model of cost-per-click was adapted from the old CPM model for print advertising. Epic Advertising's Don Mathis points out that the New York Times print editions have recently charge as much as $200 CPMs. The model is proving economically inefficient. Maybe, he says, print is dying, not because we're in a big recession, but because the advertising model that supports it doesn't work.
Mobile advertising is finally getting a chance with the advent of the iPhone and similar devices. Up until now, mobile ads were nothing but tiny little mini-billboards on a tiny little screen. With the new smartphone wave, as the power of the new medium increases, the power of the branded advertising unit builds. When that reaches its critical mass, it will make it easy for people to buy the items the want at scale-then the real money starts rolling in.