Back in August I read a great article called ‘Still Banging Away…‘ by Doug Weaver which was actually a re-post of an article he had written in 2007. This article really gives a good sense of how despite technology moving forward at lighting speed, a lot of the mindset within the online ad industry is still there where it was many years ago.
The article explores how despite technologies that allow for dynamic, expandable and richly engaging ad units, success is still mostly measured in terms of Clicks:
“Ten (NOW 15) years have gone by and everything has changed. Everything, that is, except our crack-like dependency on the click. In recent months I’ve spoken to dozens of marketers, agency execs and publishers and it’s become dismally apparent that nobody’s really moving on. Maybe the click-based success of Google is effectively blocking the sun on this issue, but we’re still living in collective darkness. It’s impossible to realize the true depth of web ROI when we always default to a metric that says we fail 975 of every 1000 times we touch the consumer.”
In this kind of scenario, does it even make sense to swim against the current ?
