Fairfax
Cone, one of the great men of advertising, said his craft was nothing more than
"what you do when you can’t go see somebody." This simple distinction
draws a perfect line between TV and the Web. TV is the best medium ever created
for advertising. The Web is the best medium ever created for sales. The Web,
like the telephone, is a way you can go see somebody, a way to talk with them,
show your wares, answer their questions, offer referrals, and make it easy for
them to buy whatever they want. Why get someone to look at an ad on the Web
when, with exactly the same amount of wrist power, you can get them into your
electronic storefront itself?
Sure,
you can advertise on the Web, and many Internet companies say advertising is
how they are going to make their money. And the sum of advertising on the Web
keeps going up. Why not? Just liquidate a few percent of those moon-high stock
valuations and buy a few billion dollars more Web advertising. Forrester
Research reports that "despite cries that online ads don’t work, spending
for Internet advertising will continue to grow at a furious pace." They
say spending will explode from $2.8 billion in 1999 to $33 billion in 2004.
But
Web advertising is already an inside joke. Most of the banner ads you see at
the tops of pages are trades and sponsorships, not paid advertising. And
everybody knows that having your page turn up in the top ten results when
someone goes hunting at a major search site is far more effective than buying
ads on Web sites. (This, predictably, has sparked the buying of ads on search
sites.)
There’s
no denying that a saturation ad campaign that puts your company’s name in tens
of millions of banner ads will buy you some name recognition. But that
recognition counts for little against the tidal wave of word-of-Web. Look at
how this already works in today’s Web conversation. You want to buy a new
camera. You go to the sites of the three camera makers you’re considering. You
hastily click through the brochureware the vendors paid thousands to have
designed, and you finally find a page that actually gives straightforward
factual information. Now you go to a Usenet discussion group, or you find an
e-mail list on the topic. You read what real customers have to say. You see
what questions are being asked and you’re impressed with how well other buyers
-- strangers from around the world -- have answered them. You learn that the
model you’re interested in doesn’t really work as well in low light as the
manufacturer’s page says. You make a decision. A year later, some stranger in a
discussion group asks how reliable the model you bought is. You answer. You
tell the truth.
Compare
that to the feeble sputtering of an ad. "SuperDooper Glue -- Holds
Anything!" says your ad. "Unless you flick it sideways -- as I found
out with the handle of my favorite cup," says a little voice in the
market. "BigDisk Hard Drives -- Lifetime Guarantee!" says the ad.
"As long as you can prove you oiled it three times a week," says
another little voice in the market. What these little voices used to say to a
single friend is now accessible to the world. No number of ads will undo the
words of the market. How long does it take until the market conversation
punctures the exaggerations made in an ad? An hour? A day? The speed of word of
mouth is now limited only by how fast people can type. Word of Web will trump
word of hype, every time.
Ads
may still have hypnotic, subliminal effects, like those tunes we can’t get out
of our heads (a legacy of the old advertising industry adage "if you have
nothing to say, sing it"), but we now have the world’s largest support
group encouraging us to take that first step: we acknowledge that there is a
power greater than ourselves, and it’s not some freaking banner ad or a cola
company whacking our head with a jingle. It’s the conversation that is the Web.
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