How We Tried to Make a Square Peg Fit Into a Round Hole – Early Online Media
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(Continued from the previous post: Wasting Half Your Money on Traditional Advertising)
There was a reason that early online advertising was referred to as ‘New Media’. Because it was new – really, really, new (hmmm kind of obvious eh?).
It was the first new way of advertising to come about since the advent of television. It was also adopted into the mainstream in record time – faster than any other medium, including TV, cable and radio. And advertising professionals had no idea what to do with it.
None!
So they tried to apply traditional advertising guidelines and rules to it, and that’s how the first online advertising campaigns came about.
Banner ads, big boxes, skyscrapers were the first forms of online advertising. Visual ads that mimicked outdoor and magazine campaigns, bought by the thousand (literally – CPM or cost-per-thousand was the main metric when buying ad space online.)
Advertisers were over the moon about the ability to actually measure the performance of the ads. Click-through-rate was the new Mecca, and set the bar for the success for failure of an online advertising campaign. Never mind that it didn’t really tell you anything other than how many people clicked on the ad – it was a real, honest-to-God measurement of how the ads were being perceived.
Then pay-per-click came out… and WOW!
You mean, we only have to pay for the ads that actually succeed in their goal? It went against everything that traditional advertising had ever done.
Then, as the medium become more competitive, the ads became more annoying. Pop-ups, pop-unders and the like were the new version of the flashy (in this case sometimes literally flashy), obtrusive ads that began to annoy people. Because the ad agencies were taking everything they knew about traditional advertising and throwing it at the internet. Software developers came up with ad blockers.
So how were you to reach your customers if you couldn’t hit them with 17 pop-up boxes?
We had to rethink the way we were communicating. Websites, up until this point, had become simply extensions of their offline counterparts; they were still talking at their users, not with them. Online campaigns were just an echo or an afterthought of the traditional campaign. Even the more forward-thinking companies were only spending about 1% of their total advertising budget online.
And all that was done with all of this new information is that agencies took the click-throughs and all other learnings from the campaigns and put them into a pretty post-buy report like they did with the TV and radio campaigns and sent it off to the client. They would make sure to utilize the best-performing sites and drop the ones that did poorly, but that’s about the extent of the introspection. They didn’t take into consideration that maybe the ads weren’t resonating with the audiences of the sites they were advertising on, or that the site with the highest click-through-rate also had the highest abandonment rate once users reached the site. They also didn’t take into consideration that no matter how much money they threw at the campaigns, if their site sucked and didn’t have any useful information to offer users, users wouldn’t buy their product or come back.
Slowly, the tide began to turn and people started to realize the real value that the internet held. People began to realize the potential of the web to deliver useful content to potential buyers at just the right moment in the buying cycle.
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s continuation 
Google didn’t introduce the “concept” of pay per click. It was introduced by GoTo.com which later turned into Overture.com which then sold to Yahoo.com
LOL… WOW I cant believe I wrote that, there wuz a bit of a brain fart. Good catch and thanks
More like google popularize it?
Popularized, optimized and racked in a fortune with it!
Hi Jason,
When will you write the review for me? I’ve been trying to contact you by email several times, but I haven’t seen any answer from you.
/Andreas
That post made for a very interesting read – I remember the days of the good old pop-ups, thank god for pop up blockers!
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[...] How it Works Today (Or Should Work)… Written by John Cow on June 29th, 2009 // (Continued from the previous post: How We Tried to Make a Square Peg Fit Into a Round Hole With Early Online Media) [...]
[...] June 29, 2009How it Works Today (Or Should Work)… (Continued from the previous post: How We Tried to Make a Square Peg Fit Into a Round Hole With Early Online Media) [...]