You're More Likely To... Insult Our Intelligence

Feel Teh Dumb

While I've been in marketing and advertising for over a generation, I've been pontificating about it in public as a content marketer (shh! I'm doing content marketing, kind of, right now!) for less than six months.

What I've learned most in that time? That there are some breathtakingly dumb, or at the very least, willfully ignorant, people who are also publishing about these very same subjects. This was manifest most plain in this little snippet in a treasure trove of dumb, in a column that I am not going to cite or link to because rewarding the dumb is against my ethics. The money quote from that is one that you are likely to see, or may have already. It's so dumb that we need to beat it down with sticks, and set it on fire, and then get serious. Here it is: you are more likely to survive a plane crash than click on a banner ad.

Now, I could talk about the branding benefit of display ads. I could talk about how A/B studies show rises in purchasing for prospect groups that have seen relevant display ads, or increased search engine traffic and email and direct mail conversion, and so on, and so on. I could talk about determining true response rates when you factor out bot traffic, or other forms of page view busting malfeasance. I could talk about viewability and above the fold points, or how click traffic on mobile can be a complete whiff because of user error. All of which is so obvious to everyone who runs display campaigns, and why they care more about viewability than click rate, because only utter freaking idiots care only about click rates. I could also ask about what kind of planes, what defines a crash, and where you get these sentiments, but I'm pretty sure we all know the neighborhood, seeing as we've all got one, and tend to need to cater to its needs on a routine basis.

But as this has been a clear and obvious point that adtech pros have been trying to make for the better part of a decade, I'm going to try a different tactic. Did you also know that you are more likely to help a  narwhale give birth, than buy a car from a single 30-second automobile ad? Clearly, no one should ever buy or make one of those. The odds of shifting your business computing systems from exposure to sponsorship at a golf tournament is the same as gargling with motor oil by mistake, and the odds of shifting your prescription heartburn medication from an OTC ad is the same as discovering a cure for male pattern idiocy.

Clicks on banners are nice, if you are placing the ad campaign. Sales as part of a coordinated media campaign, with lifts in your other channels coming from the branding and awareness benefit that a viewed and relevant campaign can provide, is what you are actually trying to accomplish.

But so long as we are, you know, slandering a marketing and advertising channel for things that aren't very important, as if they were the be-all and end-all of their existence...

Well, why be so limited as to stick to tried and true nonsense, when there's a whole world of brand new nonsense to explore?

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