Drab Bus Rides and ROI
Riding the bus in to work this morning, two media factoids hit me right in the eyeballs, and set me a’thinking.
I took my seat, Wall Street Journal in hand, and asked myself why the inside of the bus was so drab. My eyes drifted to the only piece of color – the purple of a Monster.com advertisement – and I immediately realized what was wrong. The Monster.com ad, a 30″ x 12″ insert above the window, was the only ad in the bus. “Huh.”
And then I flipped to the technology section of the Journal and immediately saw this story – even Google couldn’t make newspaper advertising work. “Huh.”
Signs of the times, maybe. But maybe it’s more than that. During a downturn, a rational marketer will start by slashing those formats that offer the slimmest demonstrable ROI. For a long time, traditional formats (TV, print, outdoor, etc.) were the bastions of demonstrable ROI, while new media (search, banner, video, etc.) was the experimental stuff. “Yes, new media engages people,” the agencies said, “but you have to think about it differently.” (Read: sorry, we can’t quite quantify it.) However, this economic downturn seems to be coinciding with the rise of new techniques and technologies that allow marketers to determine a more precise ROI on new media outlays. As a result, traditional ad spending has fallen out of bed while some new media formats were up in 2008, and may continue up in 2009. (For instance, Emarketer estimates that online video advertising will increase 44.9% to $850 million in 2009.) In other words, marketers now see new media formats delivering stronger demonstrable ROI than traditional formats.
Does this signal a tipping point? Will this downturn and these new technologies slosh enough traditional dollars over to the new media side to finally break its “experimental” perception? Perhaps we’ll look back on the current climate as the catalyst that pushed new media over the edge. If that’s the case, I’m in for a long slog of drab bus rides.
