The first company I started was an advertising based business. My partner and I bought/licensed/rented advertising inventory from minor league baseball stadiums and repackaged it into regional networks. We figured that teams that were averaging a few thousand fans a game couldn’t afford the type of sales force necessary to sell-out their advertising, but if we could roll-up their inventory into a network we could find a way to sell it.
What we quickly found out is that advertising is incredibly difficult to sell. It’s not that it isn’t effective, or that it isn’t needed, but selling is all about benefits and it is very hard to quantify the benefits of traditional advertising.
I think the reason everyone is drooling over web advertising is because they are confusing who measurability is good for. Web-advertising is great because it is so easy to sell and because it makes a marketer’s job easier, but does it really do a better job at delivering a message than TV or Radio or Print?
The other mediums are figuring out that measurability is good for business and are developing the tools to measure the ROI of their inventory. When this happens, web advertising will be just another advertising tool in a marketer’s repertoire and the allure of web advertising will be gone.
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