Jonah’s Rant on Ad Ecologies
My friend and uber-analysis maven (nextNY‘er too), Jonah Keegan, wrote a fairly in-depth posting over at his not-often enough updated blog. The reason why I say, “not-often enough” is because it’s fantastic. I just wished he posted a lot more.
Anyway, his posting goes into high level advertising ecology theory in the online space. Jonah looked at the ecosystem without marketing speak, but if I were to add in a few buzz words and thoughts from an advertising background, he’s essentially talking about ATL vs. BTL advertising.
- Above the line
- Below the line
Above the line advertisers are trying to drive brand awareness and consideration and tend to be the AT&T’s, DELL, Tropicana, Coca Cola’s of this world. Big bucks going into ATL campaigns. The below the line advertisers tend to be folks looking for a conversion metric such as CTR or CPA goal and are those folks like the Adult Friend Finder. These two types of advertising are not mutually exclusive though. A big brand advertiser can use BTL mediums & mixes and the other way around, it just depends on the campaign goals.
We’re still in the very early stages of the digital media spectrum and our technologies are being built out further each day that will allow us to harness these mediums much more effectively. All the answers are not out there as we don’t know what most of the questions are yet. We’re 12 years into this unbelievable journey and we’ve come a long way, but we’re still not even close to summiting the mountain of digital media.
Do publishers know the value of their content yet? Yes -the value is whatever someone will pay for it. It’s like a baseball card. I’ve got “millions of dollars” of baseball cards at my folks house in Westchester, but unless someone offers me money for them, they are worth nothing. However, I do think that the value of the medium will evolve once we have more insight into how we can harness it more efficiently.