Analyze This!

This is getting deep. As I become more and more immersed in the world of digital advertising, I’m realizing how complex this all really is…and, of course, still so simple. Advertising has always been about getting and holding people’s attention…an hour, a minute, a second…attention + time = value. And that “value” is how advertising agencies get paid. But in the amorphous world of attention, we can’t always assume we have it, unless, of course, we do. By that I mean , the 20th century model of attention as holding a someone’s attention for a couple of hours or an hour or a moment for that matter. Once the advertiser has your attention, they can provide the occasional “public message” or commercial, assuming that if you were still glued to the set. If spellbound by CSI (Miami, New York, LA…etc)  youwould be just as “glued” to the soap sell. Of course, we all know that’s not usually the case, this is where most of us flip thechannel, make a sandwich, mentally tune out. But there are always exceptions. If you can just catch the right someone at the right time with the right product then SHAZAM! you have a sale. Odds are against it, but if you millions of eyeballs sucking in your message, your bound to get some bites. And even without the direct response, being the greedy little consumers that we are, we inevitably shop for things we know nothing about…from soap to snowblowers, and as we’re walking through the shopping aisle hoping to find  brand Whatever, we find brands A to Z. So many to choose from, how do I choose? Why I see Brand A on tv all the time, Ill buy that one…even though Brand B is cheaper and probably superior. But that’s what those advertiser dollars are for.

Unfortunately, those dollars can’t be exactly co-related into actual dollars and cents. Advertising, like economics, is an inexact science.  Well, it WAS an inexact science anyway. Now its becoming almost pure science. I use the television analogy for 2 reasons.

1) I am still, yes I hate to admit, a regular television watcher. No I don’t watch network shows or American’s Got Talent. Mostly sports, old movies and nostalgia and even then, though, I shouldn’t admit, I have to trust my DVR to save the day for me. In one nostalgic episode of one of my favorite comedians narrated shows, I counted 10 commercials, between the intro and the start of the actual program. TEN! There was a time when it took the entire half hour to show 10 commercials. No one over the age of 8 is going to sit through 10 commercials without flipping the channel, going to sleep or turning the tube off all together. No one.

2) People like me, people who watch any kind of television, are rapidly going the way of the dodo bird. Not enough to kill the industry just yet, but enough to see the writing on the wall. And that writing will be page views, event conversions and line graphs. The Internet has brought an evolutionary leap into our lives. I can honestly remember a time when the Internet”, better known as the “World Wide Web”,  was there simple to “inform”.  Now we depend on it to run our daily lives, our governments, and, yes, our entertainment…in short, its where all those eyeballs are drifting off to…by the hundreds of millions..even billions.

But its the share scope of the Internet that provides both the risks and rewards. With hundreds of millions of eyeballs pouring through the Internet every day, sitting down behind a tube to watch today’s bad news seems superfluous to the average user of the Net, whether desktop, pad or mobile. But the real magic of the Internet isn’t just all those eyeballs, but now we know what all those eyeballs see when they come to any particular website, whether its to read international news, catch up with friends and family on Facebook or buy a new pair of shoes. It may seem a little creepy but actually its not, it just gives the new generation of “techies” that more to play with…data. Data, data everywhere. We’ll get to that subject in another article to come.