Monday, July 29, 2019

"Why the 'obsession of advertisers to make their advertising perfectly individualized and perfectly personalized may be perfectly wrong'"

From The Ad Contrarian, January 07, 2019:

Why Online Ads Haven't Built Brands
This post is adopted from a podcast I did last year.
One of the questions I’ve been wrestling with for years is why online advertising seems to be incapable of building major consumer-facing brands.

We’ve had 20 years of phenomenal growth of online advertising and yet I have trouble coming up with one example of a major consumer-facing physical brand that was built by online advertising. I can think of no examples of major brands of beer, soda, cars, toothpaste, paper towels, candy bars, soap, fast food, peanut butter — you get the picture — that were built by online advertising.

After 20 years of existence radio and TV had built hundreds - if not thousands - of consumer brands.

There are some who would argue that there are very big web-native brands that have been built by online advertising - e.g., Amazon, Google, and Facebook. I’m not so sure that advertising played a major role in the building of any of those brands, but let’s leave that argument for another day and just focus on brands that are physical and not web-native, which probably constitute somewhere around 95% of the products we buy every day.

What’s the issue with online advertising that has rendered it ineffective at advertising’s most important job — building a major brand?

For years I fumbled around trying to answer this question but I’ve never really understood it. I have blamed an absence of creativity. I have blamed the fact that it’s mostly direct response style advertising, but I’ve never really evolved a comprehensive theory of what the problem is....MUCH MORE
HT: Richard Shotton's Twitter feed:

Posted by at