Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Advertising on the Web vs. TV

Hugh Hewitt has a short piece today describing one more reason why advertisers will find blogs and website more attractive than TV. He mentions the fact that most people leave the room during commercial breaks on TV. On the web, the ads are integrated into the content.

It's a good point and there's many more. Here's my three favorites.

1. The web provides a much more direct connection between advertising a sales. You can track IP addresses and referring sites and figure out how a customer found out about you. You can then go back and increase your advertising on that site. It can all be done automatically. In the TV and print world, the firm has to produce those annoying customer comment cards that ask "How did you hear about us?" They then have to collect them, enter them into a database and analyze them. They pay employees to do that every step of the way.

2. The web provides a much more effective marketing tool for market segmentation. Ford and Chevy can run SUV and minivan ads on kids' soccer sites and then run sports car ads on MySpace. On TV, you have to pick between the two and know that a bunch of 20-somethings are watching the NFL game where you're spending a ton of money advertising your SUVs.

And the best one of all for the advertisers:

3. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Those Adsense ads to the left are free advertising until someone clicks on them. For political candidates, this is golden because they can get name recognition practically for free. On TV or in the papers, you pay whether the ad works or not.

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