uiscZ

Who’s Listening
Purple Cow
I’m guilty of a little hyperbole. With all the hand wringing
over the death of the TV-industrial complex and the predictions
of the demise of all mass media, it’s easy to jump
to the conclusion that ads don’t work at all – that every
consumer avoids and ignores all of them.
Of course, this isn’t true. Ads do work – not as well as
they used to, and perhaps not cost-effectively, but they do
attract attention and generate sales. Targeted ads are far
more cost-effective, yet most advertising and marketing
efforts are completely untargeted. They are hurricanes,
whipping through a marketplace horizontally, touching
everyone in the same way, regardless of who they are and
what they want. There’s a huge amount of waste here, so
much that it’s easy to assert that advertising isn’t working.
Yes, sometimes this hurricane allows you to skip the
painstaking work of moving from the left to the right.
Sometimes the entire market needs something, knows
they need it, and are willing to listen. The key word here,
though, is sometimes.
Sometimes is pretty rare – so rare that it’s wasteful. It’s
wasteful because the vast majority of ads reach people who
are not in the market for what’s being sold, or who aren’t
likely to tell their friends and peers about what they’ve
learned.
But a very different kind of ad does work. Why What is
it about some ads and some products that makes them successful,
while others fail Why, for example, do the little
text-only ads on Google perform so well while the flashy,
full-page, annoying banners on Yahoo! do so poorly
We have to start with another look at the power in the
marketing equation. In the old days, marketers targeted
consumers. Smart ad folks worked hard to make sure their
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