A piece in this morning’s FT reports that the internet rather than TV is now “the UK’s largest advertising medium”. The underlying data comes from a PwC report commissioned by the Internet Advertising Bureau.
Much of the FT’s report is concerned with whether lumping together paid search, email, and display ads is a fair way to measure but the key thing to note is really why the web is now the advertising medium of choice. One sentence in the report comes close to nailing it:
Online advertisers are able to discern more precisely than from other media how many people have seen a commercial and whether they have made an immediate purchase.
Advertisers are notoriously cagey about the metrics of ad campaigns, so the web’s transparency is a welcome change for most marketing departments. And yet, no level of transparency could compensate if there was no traffic. What’s important for businesses is that web users are expecting ads and choosing to respond when they want to. Instead of interruptions – as in a TV ad – web users are served ads that complement their browsing and searches.
This is such a huge difference. Look at the nature of web ads: the most successful (Google AdWords ads) are simply lines of text. It is the context rather than the content that defines successful web advertising and this is at the heart of why small businesses must develop a web presence that engages with their potential customers.
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