The Golden Age of Internet Marketing? • Hacker News Board

Re: The Golden Age of Internet Marketing?

#11

Post by aweissman » Mon, Nov 28, 2011, 9:59 PM UTC

stfu wrote: post #5

jonnathanson wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Andrew's thesis is very interesting, but he's a little too quick to throw out various babies with their bathwater. Take his dismissal of psychological approaches to advertising, for instance. Why? Why are sociology and psychology no longer relevant? Maybe they're irrelevant in the old-school, Don Draperesque sense of their use (i.e., people sitting around in a boardroom and telling narratives about What People Want,…

Weissman needs to differentiate more. He seems to be mixing up marketing, advertising and sales. I would argue that "people sitting around in a boardroom and telling narratives about What People Want, and so forth)" are still core to successful advertising. At the core of advertising is the "idea" - almost similar to a startup. Neither number crunching nor some psychological tricks are able to replace this. In fact t…

I mixed those concepts up purposely in order to make the larger point which is that we may be on the cusp of native monetization schemes - ones that are consistent with how users use web services

Re: The Golden Age of Internet Marketing?

#12

Post by aweissman » Mon, Nov 28, 2011, 10:00 PM UTC

imjk wrote: post #9

While I agree with the author's conclusion that better integrated "ad" units like StubleUpon's Paid Discovery, and Twitter's Promoted Tweets will become both more prevalent and affective, his premise that contextual ads don't work is just false. He's also also wrong in thinking that these more integrated ads are entirely new concepts, divergent from old media such as television, cinema, magazines, and periodicals. Th…

i dont think traditional media advertisers have applied these principles to web ads; thus my conclusion that display doesnt work. New products - maybe even some that I mentioned - will work better

Re: The Golden Age of Internet Marketing?

#13

Post by aweissman » Mon, Nov 28, 2011, 10:01 PM UTC

eykanal wrote: post #6

There seem to be two points to this article; (1) CTR is a terrible metric for ad effectiveness, and (2) the web is an extremely rich medium for displaying ads, and there's still potential that has yet to be discovered. I'm not sure why the author combined those points in a single thought, but they're both valid, and (I think) very true.

I combined them because I thought they were related, e.g., low CTR is evidence that we need better ads

Re: The Golden Age of Internet Marketing?

#14

Post by aweissman » Mon, Nov 28, 2011, 10:02 PM UTC

tsunamifury wrote: post #4

I think the more obvious and less 'revolutionary' way of stating his point is that ads that focused on awareness (i.e. i wasn't looking for information about this but you are telling me anyways) are dying in the face of ads that focus on conversion (i.e. I was looking for this and your ad helped me find it and buy it). This isn't a radical change or even the end of advertising, its just more efficient.

Agreed - i didnt say this was a revolution, perhaps I shoukd have instead stated this was evolutionary

Re: The Golden Age of Internet Marketing?

#15

Post by jonnathanson » Tue, Nov 29, 2011, 2:08 AM UTC

aweissman wrote: post #11

stfu wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weissman needs to differentiate more. He seems to be mixing up marketing, advertising and sales. I would argue that "people sitting around in a boardroom and telling narratives about What People Want, and so forth)" are still core to successful advertising. At the core of advertising is the "idea" - almost similar to a startup. Neither number crunching nor some psychological tricks are able to replace this. In fact t…

I mixed those concepts up purposely in order to make the larger point which is that we may be on the cusp of native monetization schemes - ones that are consistent with how users use web services

"...we may be on the cusp of native monetization schemes - ones that are consistent with how users use web services..."

Perhaps, but that doesn't negate the strategic fundamentals of either marketing, advertising, or sales. The emergence of breakthrough tactics -- even disruptive tactics -- does not necessarily upend strategy. In some cases, it simply allows the marketer (or advertiser) to pursue his/her strategy more effectively.

"The product sells itself" is, to some extent, a misperception. Even in the coming state of things. No product ever truly sells itself -- even if it is found in search, or recommended by a friend, or stumbled upon. The art and science of building, distributing, pricing, and positioning that product -- so that is is recommended by the right people to the right people, stumbled upon under the right circumstances, or searched for in the right context -- still draws upon all the knowledge built up in the marketing field to date.