For years, online advertisers have been able to reach audiences through networks that distribute ads to publishers all over the Web. These networks have been very successful at serving the needs of advertisers, despite the fact that they overlook the needs of the audience members they are trying to reach. The banner ads and text ads served by these networks still have their place in an online marketing strategy, but their usefulness continues to deteriorate.
With technical solutions like browser plug-ins that automatically block text ads and banner ads, a reader may never see what’s being distributed by even the most successful, ubiquitous networks. Perhaps even more troubling is the ‘human solution’ to unwanted ads. As many people scan hundreds, even thousands of Web pages a day, the average Internet user is becoming much savvier. People have trained themselves to block out entire sections of Web pages that they deem lacking utility or relevance.
For publishers, who lifeblood is advertisements, the only way to overcome this and regain the user’s attention is to forget about advertisers (at least for a while), and concentrate on giving the user what they want.
Now, taking the focus off the hand that feeds you – the advertiser – may seem counter-intuitive, but it makes a lot of sense when you take a few steps back. You can fool an advertiser into using a solution that provides seemingly great features and functionality, but what they really want is results -- in the form of traffic. The only way they’re going to get that traffic is by giving the user what they want.
‘If You Build It, They Will Come’
In Field of Dreams, it took Kevin Costner a while to figure out what the heck the disembodied voice wanted him to do. When you’re talking about the Web, it’s a no-brainer. Most people browsing the Web are looking for something specific. They want content that’s relevant to their needs, and they want it at their fingertips. Some might argue that using personalization engines to serve relevant ads could give a user what they’re looking for, but at best, that comes in a distant second to providing relevant and useful information.
Online ad solutions have been very successful – in fact, the Web 2.0 revolution would not be here without them. But, in general, ad solutions could be much more successful if they were user-centric in nature. The good news is, accomplishing this can be done by building upon the same principles that have made ad solutions so successful for so long. In addition to building a library of ads that can be distributed via a network and accessed by relevant users, think about a library of useful content that can satisfy a user’s search for specific information.
Now, imagine the success that can be achieved by building one network that allows the user to select both the content and ads and they want to see. By offering the user quality content, traffic will follow, and pairing that content with relevant ads in the same network creates incremental revenue for both publishers and advertisers.
Paying specific attention to the user gets even more important as the web goes hyper-local. Local search and local online advertising are billion dollar markets that have gained the attention of Google, MSN and Yahoo! as they jockey to figure out the winning formula. However, as the market gets bigger, in many ways the Web itself gets smaller. Local users are hard to satisfy, and even harder to ignore when they’re unhappy.
Paring content and advertisements within the same network is an efficient way to give users what they want, in the form of relevant content, and to give advertisers what they want, in the form of increased traffic. This not only satisfies the user, but everyone else involved makes out pretty well too.