If We Treated Offline Ads The Way We Treat Online...

Stop Hitting Yourself, Stop Hitting...

Imagine, just for a moment, what the world of offline marketing and advertising would look like, if we treated it the same as we do online.

(These are the kinds of things that online advertising and marketing pros dream about, especially on summer Fridays, when Problem Clients call at 4:45pm to tell you, at length, why they are unhappy and why you should be unhappy, too. Good times! But I digress.)

So...

Outdoor billboards: A portion of the placements only get to charge for the percentage of drivers that view the art. The others only get to charge for the number of people who directly respond, probably via a special phone number or URL. No one cares if these results come from a sign that's on a busy road, or one that's only seen on Google Earth. Oh, and any billboard that's particularly attuned to the needs and wants of the driver causes many journalists to mount a piece of furniture, pull up their petticoats, and shriek about privacy.

Television ads -- Viewers need to be stationary and in the room for broadcast to begin. For a percentage of the campaign, payment only occurs if the consumer takes an action following the ad. Finally, the ads all need to comply to outdated production standards of small file size, and a portion of the flight has to be in analog film, because a number of channels refuse to invest in infrastructure to get to newer standards.

Direct mail -- Not charged for postage unless received by the consumer and opened, so anything that goes straight into the recycling can is free to the person who rents the list. Since this medium has been around longer than others, anyone that works in the field is scorned by other producers, despite the solid ROI.

Radio -- Again, only charged for direct and attributable action from the consumer, so the content is constantly surrounded by a thick covering of constant advertising. Since there is no branding advantage accepted, a tragedy of the commons impacts all but the most highly rated programs.

Event sponsorship -- Thanks to our perfect reporting of those who directly engage with the brand, event sponsors only pay for the subset of attendees who can recall, in a post-event survey, the association.

Anyway... you get the point, right? The idea that offline ads are the only way to establish brand, and online can not have branding impact because we can measure response so well... it's been this bubble point that everyone who works on one side of the desk knows has to end one day, while the other side just keeps on insisting that things continue the way they are. Because there's more inventory than opportunity, and the technology allows advertising to match the personal profile instead of the demography of a particular site, branding benefits in online have always been a non-starter.

Will anything ever pop the unreality? Well, maybe. I'm a big believer in data and analytics eventually winning the day, and when we add in the Internet of Things to give us additional distribution and data collection moments, maybe the targeting gets so good that we have to accept the de facto branding. If the fragmentation of mass media continues, maybe that accelerates the market correction as well.

But man alive, some of us have been taking the myth of no billable impact for online brand awareness for decades now. When do we get to stop hitting ourselves with data?

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