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How We Tried to Make a Square Peg Fit Into a Round Hole – Early Online Media

Jason Katzenback — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:57:22 +0000

(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

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Jason Katzenback — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:05:30 +0000

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Fat & Lazy People Will Make You Rich

Jason Katzenback — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:08:21 +0000

If I offended you by the title let me first of all apologize but once you listen to the below podcast you will 100% understand what I am talking about.

As you may recall, last week I mentioned about an interview I was going to do today… well I did it a few hours ago, I know you are going to love it and one of the things that really stuck out to me was the “Fat & Lazy” comment.

Now, I know that is not politically correct but the concept of what was being talked to in the podcast is an important one. The idea of people wanting you to do everything for them is so true and it is such a powerful revenue model. Look at Home Depot, they have such an amazing business model… they give you the tools, they give you the training but if you have the money they will also do 100% of the work for you to.

I have incorporated this in my business because there are people that love the tools and or training but there are others that want it all and they want you to do it for them and most important of all…

They Will Pay For It!

As you listen to this interview, ask yourself these questions…

1. What problems are people in my niche complaining about?
2. What solution to those problems can I provide those that have more time than money?
3. What solution to those problems can I provide those that have more money than time?

This is a great conversation with someone that has transformed their business and if you can not get some fantastic ideas from this then you are not listening. There is advice and ideas that can be applied to every niche there is.

Now for those of you that are subscribed readers of Johncow.com via email, I sent you the written transcript in PDF format. If you would like to receive the transcript then opt in and you will also get a free copy of my “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog”.

Right Click Here and select “Save As” to Download the Audio and listen to it in your favorite MP3 player (download is in Zip format)

Listen online now –> Click Here

REMINDER: There is absolutely nothing to up sell or buy with this podcast… this is just 100% good content.

Make sure to also check out Timothy Sykes site at http://www.timothysykes.com/

So, what is your feedback on this interview… did you like it.. did you learn something?