Media face structural, regulatory, and technical hurdles to effectively monetizing with ads on the internet, but there are some solutions that are working. » about 1000 words
Ethan Zuckerman’s recent post, What if they stop clicking? points out the difficulty of building a business on ad revenue. He points to statistics that show fewer readers are clicking banner and arguments from the web advertising industry about how un-clicked ads still build brand awareness. It’s not really central to Zuckerman’s point, but I […] » about 300 words
All Facebook is happy to share the ten laws of Facebook advertising, but will those rules lead to better results than the .02% CTR Bob Gilbreath got a year ago?
No sooner do I lay down a rant about how bad Sprint WiFi is than do they run an ad telling us how great their service is. Well, not only that, but they promise to save us from “Connectile Dysfunction.”
Angela Natividad described it best:
It’s hard to position broadband ads. You can be like Earthlink, which kind of laughs at the whole idea of marketing in general, and you can be like Comcast, which takes the easy way out with off-colour humour. Or you can make up a disease, kind of like Microsoft, and propose that your product will in fact cure it.
There’s a fine art to this tactic. A good rule of thumb: the closer you can get your made-up disease to sound like a sexual disorder, the better. Maybe people will get confused and mistakenly believe you could solve both problems, not just (the invented) one. Cute, Sprint. Cute.
It would all be chuckle-worthy enough if — as Zach and Matt pointed out when the shared the ad with me — if I hadn’t just complained about how lousy their Wifi service is.