Am I saying this to discourage advertisers from advertising online ?
Posted: Sun Jan 19, 2025 4:12 am
In the first half of this year, almost 6% less money was spent on TV advertising than last year. Blame the crisis? The fact is that advertiser money has been moving online at an ever-increasing rate for some time now . The largest part of it is spent on search advertising, another growing area of interest for advertisers is online videos.
Drooling over the visitor counter
I know: the past is gone, the future is now. Yet I see history repeating itself. Just as all advertisers once expected too much from TV advertising, they now sit drooling in front of their website’s visitor counter as soon as they put a video on their YouTube channel or Facebook page. For some reason, every marketer has come to think that their video will surely go viral in the furthest reaches of the social media world, and that traffic to the brand or company website will explode exponentially. Or, as product managers fresh out of school sometimes think, that the lines on all the sales graphs will suddenly start to rise steeply.
That could well be possible, just as I could have a winning lottery saudi arabia mobile phone number list ticket in my hands tomorrow. Because while you can still estimate the value of a regular TV commercial in advance, substantiate it somewhat through qualitative research (no guarantee of success, but still some insight) and know roughly what type of people are watching Ajax-Barcelona, with an online video you simply have to wait and see whether it will have any effect.
Photo courtesy of Fotolia
Photo courtesy of Fotolia
Peeing in the sea
Just a figure from 2012: back then, 72 hours of videos were uploaded to YouTube every 60 seconds. So it's not like a TV commercial where you try to get attention in a 'STAR block', which is also too long, among all sorts of others. You should see putting a video online as taking a pee while swimming in the sea.
No, on the contrary. These kinds of insane numbers underline the message that we advertisers have been trying to get across to marketers ever since the viral craze broke out : stop seeing online videos as a cheap way to communicate. Ten cheaply made online videos later, all of which add just as little to your brand, and you could have had an incredibly well-conceived, fantastically produced and potentially more controversial video to really make an impact online.
Drooling over the visitor counter
I know: the past is gone, the future is now. Yet I see history repeating itself. Just as all advertisers once expected too much from TV advertising, they now sit drooling in front of their website’s visitor counter as soon as they put a video on their YouTube channel or Facebook page. For some reason, every marketer has come to think that their video will surely go viral in the furthest reaches of the social media world, and that traffic to the brand or company website will explode exponentially. Or, as product managers fresh out of school sometimes think, that the lines on all the sales graphs will suddenly start to rise steeply.
That could well be possible, just as I could have a winning lottery saudi arabia mobile phone number list ticket in my hands tomorrow. Because while you can still estimate the value of a regular TV commercial in advance, substantiate it somewhat through qualitative research (no guarantee of success, but still some insight) and know roughly what type of people are watching Ajax-Barcelona, with an online video you simply have to wait and see whether it will have any effect.
Photo courtesy of Fotolia
Photo courtesy of Fotolia
Peeing in the sea
Just a figure from 2012: back then, 72 hours of videos were uploaded to YouTube every 60 seconds. So it's not like a TV commercial where you try to get attention in a 'STAR block', which is also too long, among all sorts of others. You should see putting a video online as taking a pee while swimming in the sea.
No, on the contrary. These kinds of insane numbers underline the message that we advertisers have been trying to get across to marketers ever since the viral craze broke out : stop seeing online videos as a cheap way to communicate. Ten cheaply made online videos later, all of which add just as little to your brand, and you could have had an incredibly well-conceived, fantastically produced and potentially more controversial video to really make an impact online.