Tuesday, April 13, 2010

The failure of web advertising

"We're about 15 years into the internet revolution as a mainstream phenomenon and by any measure internet advertising has to be deemed a major failure.

While the web itself has been a massive success (influencing virtually every aspect of our lives) advertising on the web is mostly a bad joke.

Fifteen years into its mainstream life, television had created scores of powerful consumer-facing brands.

The only truly powerful brands I can think of that web advertising has created are native web brands like Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Facebook. It's as if the only brands television was good at creating were CBS, NBC and ABC.

After 15 years, can anyone name even ten serious non-native consumer-facing brands that have been created by web advertising? Is there a brand of coffee, butter, beer, bread, chicken, gasoline, soda, peanut butter, dog food, milk, tires, potato chips, life insurance, lawn mowers...don't make me go on, you get the point...that has been built primarily by web advertising?" Read on...