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Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Sustainability
By Jaffer Ali
Sustainability is a condition of existence which enables
the present generation of humans and other species to
enjoy social wellbeing, a vibrant economy, and a healthy
environment, and to experience fulfillment, beauty and
joy, without compromising the ability of future
generations of humans and other species to enjoy the same.
--Guy Dauncey, speaker & author
The title of this short essay, "sustainability" is the
major concern of environmentalists and ecologists. Since
I write about online media it is fair to ask what does
this ecological term have to do with my area of expertise.
Simply put, the online media ecosystem is suffering under
the weight of many practices that render it unsustainable.
The lack of sustainability is masked by steady increases
in money from advertisers coming online. But if you pay
attention to the larger picture rather than one's
particular situation, you can see the ecosystem as a whole
is unhealthy.
What are the practices that render the online media
ecosystem unsustainable?
The Targeting Meme
There are few practices more destructive to the online
media ecosystem than behavioral targeting. The math
underlying predictive modeling promised by BT has been
proven to rest on fundamental errors and assumptions.
The benefits to publishers are nil. The benefit to
marketers is limited within such narrow parameters that
the cost is not justified. Add the disastrous privacy
issues and we have a creep factor coupled with its
inherently unscalable premise; each new "advance" into
complexity brings the system closer to collapse.
But that doesn't stop the BT purveyors eager to sell
shovels to the hopeful miners. But it is becoming more
commonplace to call BT for what it always was; snake
oil.
Overwhelming Ad Clutter
The response to declining ad performance for publishers
has been to increase more ad units per page. In ten years,
we have beaten a path from 5% ctr to .1%. Few industry
pundits acknowledge this simple fact; increasing what
people want to avoid is no way to right the ship. This
is a lot like trying to get out of a hole by digging ever
deeper.
The online media ecosystem cannot get healthy by adding
more toxic waste to the environment. And advertising has
become more and more like toxic waste to offline as well
as online audiences.
Erecting a Pay Wall
A pay wall solution completely ignores how passion over
profit trumps content owners' desire and ability to charge
for information. Forget news and current events becoming a
sustainable pay business model except in the rarest of
instances. This boondoggle proffered by Brill and Murdoch
has yet to play out in all of its inglorious permutations,
but this will certainly fail. Content creation will never
be the same as it experiences great deflationary pressures
as citizen journalists and passionate aggregators offer a
global perspective on issues from Wimbledon to Mideast
news.
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Agency Woes
Agencies are caught in an unsustainable position unless
they drastically change. Media buying is becoming more
automated and the added value of agencies becomes less
and less when creative voices take a back seat to
algorithmic solutions. Instead of emphasizing creative
and unique online offers, agencies play to their own
death march concerts. Instead of offering solutions to
an unsustainable ecosystem, agencies are so busy being
busy that few of them can actually slow down long enough
to contemplate.
Lack of Scalability
The top 100 advertisers in the US economy reportedly
account for just under 50% of the total ad spend*. Ask
any one of those big advertisers and they will universally
say that the problem with online advertising is the ability
to scale their reach. Even though over 76% of the North
American population is online**, we ought to heed their
woes. How is it that with 76%+ online, top brands are
saying they cannot reach audiences cost effectively?
The simple answer is that people are ignoring ads and what
has passed for reach is no longer a sustainable metric.
We need a new definition of reach and then a new way to
execute transmitting corporate messaging if advertising
can sustain the ecosystem.
Long Tail Niches
The wondrous aspect of the online ecosystem is the plethora
of choice and niche interests available to audiences. The
devastating aspect of our niche mentality is to believe
that every niche or hobby can be turned into a business.
Longtail nonsense driven by self-indulgent narcissism has
led to folks wasting tremendous resources chasing the
modern equivalent of the fountain of youth.
The overwhelming majority of passionate niches are not
economically sustainable and advertisers will soon
understand that continuing to subsidize ever more
fragmented marketplaces makes their jobs more difficult.
Commoditizing our passions and turning them into money
might seem like a nice idea, but common sense needs to be
restored.
Each portion of the online media ecosystem is facing the
issue of sustainability. Over the years, I have written
about many of these issues individually. But this is the
first attempt to combine the themes into a manageable
cohesive whole. There are solutions to be sure, but we
cannot begin to fully grasp them until we first recognize
that the current course is not sustainable.
* Top 100 Advertisers: http://www.kantarmediana.com/news/05262010.htm
** World Internet Usage: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
Jaffer is the CEO of Vidsense (www.Vidsense.com), arguably
the largest video network online and certainly the only
one that does not utilize ads to attract audiences.
If you would like to contact Jaffer, send him an email
at: j.ali (at) Vidsense.com or pick up the phone and
call 708-478-4500 ext. 105
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