Driving In The Rear-View Mirror
by Jaffer Ali
If you don’t see that the online media ecosystem is in
distress, then you’re just not paying attention. Click-
though rates, according to DoubleClick, have crashed,
plummeted, descended (insert your description of abysmal
failure here) to less than .1%.
For the mathematically challenged, this bears repeating.
It means that on average, less than one person per
thousand impressions is clicking though to an advertiser’s
Web site!
So, how are many industry leaders reacting? When current
metrics no longer justify their own existence, instead
of adjusting thinking, “experts” will simply develop and
then adopt new ones. And, of course, there are plenty of
research companies ready and willing to help. (What’s the
metric du jour? I don’t know, but they got one every day!)
Simply fund the research, add a pinch of clever framing,
craft some self-serving questions, and, voila…conclusive
research for any occasion!
The problem that ails the online media ecosystem cannot
be solved with redefining metrics. Any real marketer knows
– or should know — that the best place to engage the
audience is on that marketer’s own Web site. Marketers and
advertisers who can’t grasp this obvious truth are worse
than Luddites; they should be hung from the highest
yardarm.
Click-through rates now flirt with virtual zero because
the industry remains fixated on the completely reactionary
practice of viewing consumer behavior through the rear-
view mirror. What do I mean?
PAST searches…PAST Web site visits…PAST relevance…
all with no eye on the road ahead. Think about how much
time, energy and bandwidth deals with this obsession and
how pitifully little we have to show for it.
Data-mining technologies have assumed a life of their own
– have become a means to their own destructive end, just
like they did in the financial markets. Financial trading
based on PAST transactions “worked” for a time. It worked
until the caravan drove off the cliff because everybody
was driving looking in the rear-view mirror and didn’t
see the looming precipice.
Driving with the rear-view mirror will ALWAYS…let me
repeat… ALWAYS lead to a crash. It’s true for driving a
bus, driving financial trading, or driving marketing. An
occasional glance in the rear-view mirror is a good idea.
But it’s no way to get us safely where we want and need
to be.
The marketing bus is in free fall, and yet most marketers
are still looking backwards. But the proof is in.
Reactionary methodologies like behavioral targeting and
the specious metrics they spawn defy logic and don’t work.
They only provide fodder for a data-driven marketing
infrastructure desperate to delay the day of reckoning,
which I contend — and which our once vaunted and now
vanquished CTRs bear out — we have already reached.
Google Domestic Trends was recently launched on Google
Finance with the express purpose of predicting future
economic indicators through exclusively rear-viewed search
behavior. At least they had the good sense to suggest that
these predictions not be used for trading purposes.
We all carry the lessons of the past, the challenges of
the present, and the promise of the future wherever we
go. By focusing only on the past, we wreck the present
and rob our own future. If we’d just stop looking
backwards, we’d have a much clearer view of the road
ahead.
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End of MEDIA PERSPECTIVES
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