I have a variety of ads on my various web sites. That means I work with numerous advertisers and ad agencies. As webmaster, I am a publisher and they are buyers wanting to run ads on my sites. I have noticed that a number of the advertisers simply do not understand the internet and how to approach marketing on the net. Given that the net has been around for a while, this is somewhat surprising and unfortunate. I guess it just goes to show that some adapt more rapidly than others, some never adapt at all.
So here is the thing. Some of the corporations that have ads on my sites keeps sending me mail every few days about some or other new, extremely important campaign they are running. Maybe it’s a campaign for a new product, or a special discount to drive sales, or whatever. Usually the campaigns are of limited duration, often a few days or a week or two. So when advertisers want to run some new campaign they consider to be important for them on the net, they want to have all their “affiliates” (or “associates” – we’re usually called one of those things, even though for me the corporations are simply buyers of ad space), they send out their emails to us, and want us to jump.
Old time marketers are used to advertising this old fashioned way and running campaigns is how its done. That’s how it’s done on TV, radio, in newspapers and magazines. So “campaign” is a huge and important word in their vocabulary. They have historically placed ads on TV, radio, in newspapers etc. for a limited run This way of doing things works well in those media, it’s a time-proven strategy.
But it doesn’t work like that on the internet, and they don’t get it. There is a simple reason why it doesn’t work like that. Take my tiny little case. I run several web sites, with 500 or so web pages spread over a handful of sites (and I am small, there are webmasters out there with thousands and even tens of thousands of pages). I spend my time adding content, updating contents, fixing and tweaking code to improve speed, adding and modifying widgets and snippets, improving the looks and interactivity of the pages, and stuff like that. Whenever I create a new page, I place ads on it, once and for all. The one thing I do not want to do is to keep running back to my pages to modify ads, add a new campaign code or do some small change because a new campaign is running, and then run back to the same pages a few days later when the campaign is over to change the code again.
And why? It’s simple. A newspaper is set and printed anew every day. My web pages live a long, long time. To some extent what the advertiser with his brand new, exciting campaign is doing, is asking me to go back to all the previously published newspapers, back to day one, and change his ads in all those papers. And why am I not going to do it? Because I make very little money on one individual ad on one individual web page. I, and most other webmasters, make our money on many ads giving small revenue on very many pages. So it is hardly ever worth my time to go back and fiddle with 300 pages first to insert some new text and the back again to all those pages to change the text again just because of some campaign.
The marketers who understand the net, know this, and have adapted to it. Take Google and Amazon-they are smart guys. What they do is to buy space on my site. Say, for instance, sidebar ads of 160 times 600 pixels, or some other format. And then they deliver the content to this web space from their own servers in an “iframe” or with JavaScript or some such technology. And if they want to run a new campaign, they simply place new contents in the ads. They change the content continuously, and I don’t lift a finger. I don’t have to spend a single minute of my time for this to happen. When Amazon started running their recent campaign on the new improved Kindle-2, dozens of ads on my sites simply changed content. I had nothing to do with it. And I am happy with that. I am very happy, actually.
I think it’s as simple as that – pages on the internet are produced in a way that differs from other media, so the old fashioned methods have different implications and don’t work as well in the internet marketeering channel. On the other hand, there are new and other technologies for pushing content (“push technology”) that marketers with an understanding of the inner workings of the internet and how content is produced on the net, can employ. These technologies are simple to use, and with them marketers can achieve the same results on the internet as using other channels, and they can actually achieve them more easily and cost effectively.
You must log in to post a comment.