DMt's Law: If Something Is Dead, It's Probably Just Your Argument

"Display Ads Are Dead" - Clickbait header in my LinkedIn feed

Are you familiar, Dear Reader, with Godwin's Law? (Allow me to poach from Wikipedia to advance the narrative.) 

Godwin's Law is an Internet adage that basically says that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of someone involved in the discussion to try to "win" the argument by comparing their opposition to Nazism or Adolph Hitler. It's basically a sign that you can't win the argument on the merits, so you're just upsetting the table with the Hitler card and stomping off to your room.

I'd like to introduce a Godwin's corollary, and make it specific to online marketing, which is this: if a columnist says that a medium or a format is Dead, please feel free to step away from the clickbaiter and get on with the rest of your day. Because banner ads have been "dead" for most of the past two decades, along with email, and in the past five years, the desktop / laptop, video pre-roll, and I guarantee you within the next three to five years, remarketing / retargeting, blogging, native ads and anything else that shows signs of being a mature product.

I don't mean to just shrug off the issues in display. Viewability should be seen as a massive and necessary correction to the absurd notion that advertisers should pay for ads that are not seen by a human. (By the way, this also applies to the idea that ads need to be "above the fold." No, no, a thousand times, no. They have to be on sites where below the fold is, well, still seen by a human. It's a relatively simple matter of measuring time per page view, since fraud never moves slowly. But I digress.) Banner ads are 20 years old, and no direct marketing medium, especially online, should be as responsive after twenty years. That's not how direct marketing works, at least online, and if you are just looking at CTR, I'd like you to turn in any technology you own that isn't native to the year 2000, because your thinking hasn't advanced, and you don't deserve better than a Palm Pilot.

The plain and simple fact of the Internet hasn't changed, because it's the same as a law of business, or physics; someone's going to pay for it. While there are always small escapes from this as different entities try to gain mindshare or market share, gravity always returns, and will *always* return, because This Is Capitalism. 

Online ads may go from three main sizes to twenty different ones. They may incorporate video, or wrap content, or dance the line with content so much that no consumer will be able to tell the difference. They may play peekaboo in ways that irritate, or you may pay to make them go away, or find some tech shortcut... but the ads will return, like the tides. 

Why? Because they work. If you run an A/B test of groups that see them (and yes, truly see them, that viewability thing matters) against those that do not, the groups that see them respond more, buy more, know the brand more. Even if they never, ever, ever click. 

And if you really are guiding your marketing and advertising decisions by CTR-based analysis or clickbait headers or trend pieces, rather than your own data and spreadsheets and testing and ROI...

Well, your career might show up under that Dead header, too. 

But with much stronger odds of being accurate.

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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.