Great thought provoking piece from Eric expressing the genuine frustration of online marketing being dis-credited as a result of recent pieces on click fraud. While I agree with the frustration, I think there are other questions to ask before we get to the right solution.
PardonMyFrench: Why Is Online Advertising Held to a Higher Standard
Sure click fraud is an annoyance, but it can only be measured because it is part of an online advertising campaign where IP addresses are tracked, cookies placed, and every metric you can think of is tracked. It is time for online marketers to stop standing on the sidelines and letting other marketers get away with not having data. Stop moaning about click fraud and cookies being blown away because you are not helping yourself.Embrace the greatest tool you have which is more data than you can possibly analyze in a three second power point slide. We have communities, blogs, social marketing, click rates, CPCs, CPAs, search retargeting, etc all enabled with customer identifiers (non-PII or not). Please, don’t throw the data baby out with the click fraud bath water.
I posted this comment on pardonmyfrench, and want to expand on it here.
1) philosophical: internet _should_ and wants to be held to a higher standard, because it can and should be able to provide a better environment for all consumers. This is the promise of cluetrain, that in a nutshell says, that markets are conversations, and internet can facilitate those conversations. Consumers react well to open markets, and deliberately visit them to source opinions, views, suggestions, and make informed purchases.
The Cluetrain Manifesto, says this:
Online Markets… Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations.
The key here is “self organising”. Technology is the great equaliser, and allows consumers to retain freedom from whatever annoys them. Examples :
- Adblock to prevent display of advertisements
- MP3 players plugged into your car to replace the radio and its advertising
- TIVO to eliminate TV ads
- Netflix/Zap to eliminate going to the movies, and movie ads
- kids on MySpace self selecting to avoid ads, and eventually avoiding MySpace when it gets polluted
Consider the Turkish bazaar – a concept that’s been around in the middle east since time immemorial, provides a natural way for people to interact at their choice, chat, become informed, and purchase. Vendors try shouting, but get ignored. Perhaps not the best metaphor, but useful. Vendors must have quality products or they will be ignored. Consumers chat to each other, advising on which vendors are good quality. Their is a certain camradarie that supports a market.
The Cluetrain, goes on to say:
- The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
- Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
- In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.
In Dafermos extraordinary paper from 2004:
Weblogs, in other words, envisage a hierarchy circumvention mechanism, which empowers knowledgeable employees to indulge in conversations with the market rather than communicating solely by means of marketing pitches and press releases that besides have limited effectiveness in a connected market economy.
These are powerful concepts, that are now beginning to be manifested. Take Dave Winers post, referenced here, about sending people away to have them return. This is societal changing stuff. The old world was run by extroverts who operate along the lines of trad girl above. The new world the introvert is king, and quietly gets things done. Its hard for firms who are used to the old way to keep up with the new way, because they have to immerse themselves in the web, and the tools, to truly appreciate the change thats going on here. As extroverts run many old style companies, this partly explains why it takes longer to figure this stuff out.
Conclusion:
Pay per click, pay per impression .. These may not be sustainable business models as currently articulated. And the issue is not click fraud. I am assuming someone can eliminate or at least manage that with technology.
The issue is consumer value, in a world of consumate customer choice. The real model has to be “pay per purchase”, or something that represents that value. This is the only real value. This represents the meeting point of value seen by the consumer, and value seen by the vendor. There is limited if any room for pure branding plays within online. Customers will opt out.
There is room for working with people to understand their needs, breaking down the purchase cycle, so that everyone helps each other along the way to the final point of purchase.
To finish with another quote from the Cluetrain.
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