The other day, Dave Winer broke his Cuisinart coffee machine and was, within 5 minutes, able to replace it on Amazon. Therefore, online advertising is now dead.
That's a funny way to put it but you're deliberately ignoring the point he was making, which is how he selected that particular coffee maker: "people who bought this also bought this".
I don't believe for a second that online advertising is dead, because advertising has been around for a long time and I don't see why it should go away just because like in every recession it's going to be severely hit.
But the issue is click-throughs. I do have my doubts whether people will keep clicking on ads as much as they did in the past. I don't click on ads. I never have. Not because it's some kind of protest but because I never felt it would lead to anything I wanted. And there has been a study (sorry I don't have the quote) showing that the more people are familiar with the internet (or even generally more educated) the less they click on ads.
The point Winer was making, that people will rely more on peer recommendations and generally knowledge about what other people do than on advertising campains is plausible in my view.
I wasn't sure someone would be able to summarize Winer's reasoning without imploding the Universe, but I guess we are still here, so kudos to you.
This whole 'the economic world is ending and you must learn to live in the new economy that is totally unlike the old economy because times are really bad' thing is getting really, really old.
I think it's even worse than the way you put it. He broke a specific brand product, and wanted an exact replacement. Does he think that some other form of advertising, say on a TV commercial, would have convinced him to buy a different replacement product for an essentially proprietary product? Didn't think so.
I frankly wanted to link to his p5. I am very grateful that he allowed me to do so. I didn't know I wanted to link to p5 until he showed me that it was available.
I was expecting a more thought out post from such a strong title.
I don't think it makes sense to support this argument by correlating the value of advertising with the health of the economy or whatever he was trying to do. He should have left the economy out of the equation if he wanted a stronger case.
I would argue that online advertising will become more and more accurate with its targeting methods, which in turn will raise its value as opposed to destroying it.
I wouldn't describe the title as "strong," I'd describe it as a good indicator of idiocy ahead. I'm glad that online advertising can either be booming or dead; if there were a middle ground I might actually have to use my brain.
Disclaimer: I did not read this article, only the title, which enraged me sufficiently.
I believe he has made the point before that at the ultimate extreme of targeted advertising... it's not advertising anymore, it's just providing you with a product you want. Which his example is an example of; information so targeted that it goes beyond being an "ad".
Display advertising had been dying a slow and painful death for quite a while now. CTRs for banners are lower and lower.
Yet when I see ads on weblogs, on Myspace and Facebook it still strikes me how much of this advertising is still just display ads.
At the end of the last boom Overture (purchased by Yahoo in 2003, right as the economy began to emerge from the bust) and later Google brought us a new form of advertising which didn't even look like advertising to begin with: search advertising. Overture's original goal was "sponsored search": the more you bid for a term, the more relevant should the term be in search results.
Perhaps with this bubble dying a new form of advertising will emerge or has already emerged - which we won't initially (or can't yet) identify as advertising.
Brand advertising too has less of a future on the web: search advertising (especially with Google and their consideration of relevance of the ad and not just the bid value - something which didn't exist in Overture's model until Yahoo's Project Panama) enabled the "little guy", the local small businesses, the webmasters to sell their products to an audience that was looking to them.
It's folly too say "all that can invented [in advertising] is already invented". Traditional PPI/PPC banner/display advertising is drying up and rightly so (it encouraged a reductionist thinking, treating users as captive "eye balls" as opposed to customers of a product; it encouraged mee-too copycat websites which called themselves "start-ups"). Yet I wouldn't be quick to discount the possibility of something entirely different taking its place.
As long as attention is a limited resource people will be willing to pay for it. As long as people are willing to pay for attention (eye-balls) there will be advertising.
Perhaps not in its current form (banner ads, text links) but I don't see this going away anytime soon. I generally don't agree with Winer but his pieces are usually more thought out than this.
I agree with other commenters that bringing up the economy weakened his argument. I'm no economist but when times are touch elasticity and neccessity have a lot to do with what people spend money on.
Advertising is elastic and not a neccessity, its generally a means to grow your business. People are not worried about growing their business in a recession, they're worried about staying alive.
I think a lot of advertising is subliminal, especially branding.
Coke bombards you with ads because it wants to promote coke as part of your lifestyle. If you don't click on their ad banner right now, that's fine. You're more likely to recognize coke though at the grocery store.
The article also doesn't take into account that advertising is not static. Like a cat and mouse game, it evolves as its audience evolves.
In the future, advertising may be more "guerilla" or underground. Also, advertising has the capability to go "viral" now. In a matter of days, they can spread a meme across the internets. :-)
I don't think advertising is dead for everyone, only people like him. I am rarely influenced by ads. I want something, I read reviews, I shop around, I buy it. Not good for advertisers.
However, most people don't care that much and will take the first thing that looks shiny to them. Advertising is a great way to make people look at shiny things, and I think it will remain profitable as a result.
"But I chose this brand of coffee maker because people who had one really liked it, and the other brands, their users didn't like them so much."
Well, lots of ads say or infer that people who have X really liked it. I think marketers just hope you'll get your memory confused over whether you heard real people say they liked it or whether it was a more or less obvious ad.
Maybe we're getting closer to a time when advertising is not an instant revenue source for any site generating lots of traffic, but companies aren't going to stop wanting to get their name in front of people. Therefore: sites wanting to monetize through ads = maybe dead in the future. Online advertising = far from dead.
I think that Google is competing with itself. After all, suppose Google succeeds in building the perfect search engine, that always finds exactly what you are looking for. In that case, it seems as if there would be no place left for advertising (certainly not what we see today, with ads looking almost like the first search result).
However, maybe there will still be advertising, we'll just call it differently.
Or it will just be the "people who liked x also liked y" thing. For example, if someone googles for a coffee maker, he gets to see ads for coffee. I am pretty sure Google already does this.
Well, I think it's sure to piss off a lot of companies building shaky business models off ads that no body clicks on (and that is happening), but I do think this is a bit over the top.
Online advertising is just an abstraction to describe a very large and broad set of activities: getting large corporations (and even small businesses) to promote their products to potential buyers. It is the corporate instinct to drive up demand for products. This activity cannot be shaken by any recession and will forever be a source of income for those who hold the attention of an audience.
As long as consumers exist, advertising will always serve as a platform for manufacturing demand.
Online advertising changes. Product ads are headed towards blending with recommendation engines (this is what the whole "targeting" is about), branding ads can stay where they are or (more likely) go in the directions of "your friends like X".
I think Mr Winer forgets the element of competition. Advertising is not just about highlighting good products it's also teaching consumers to pick your good products over your competitor's good product.
Is generic Ibuprofen different from Advil? I think not.
