Joel’s Blog

Quick post on the Idea... Marketing, the life I live outside of wine, is an interesting beast. And right now I'm speaking of the segment of marketing that inspires people and creates brands. In a traditional world, you have magazines or publications with editorial calendars and predictable subject matter. When the Web1.0 world came along, things were basically the same, predictable order of operations but with a much lower barrier to entry creating a flood of information. Search engines and intelligent algorithms began indexing this information and added a way to generate leads for business by setting up Ads based on the content. The theory goes if you're searching for the content you might be interested some related products and/or services so here they are right next to your information. That's great for lead generation. Interestingly enough, that has minimal branding value. You can ask anyone doing search engine marketing, paid ads are great for lead generation but they work fairly similarly to how stores are merchandised - similar items are next to each other so that you generate sales. It works, everyone's happy in Web1.0 and the world creates a multi-billion dollar online advertising industry. In comes "Web2.0" where there is a shift. Really the type of fundamental shift that creates markets. It was subtle and natural evolution to end users but a disruptive shift for marketeers. This new e-commerce and publishing platform suddenly became less about broadcast and more about conversations. Less about a hyper-advanced information source and catalog and more about meeting people with common interests and creating "social" groups. Robert at WineCulture blog pointed me to an article that talks about this quite succinctly:

When people are on MySpace, the activity they’re doing isn’t search. It’s something akin to “hanging out” or “networking”. Their task is almost the opposite of search. They are already on the site they want to be on. They don’t need to click on links to take them where they want to go. In other words, the context is entirely different. When you’re in search mode, you are playing by different rules. Social ads don’t work as well because people are being social, not searching for something.

What the Author is saying is that in the world of conversations, social networking that happens to be online, and interaction, understanding context of the situation is king. Automating the placement of a static ad based on certain keyword matches has modest success on blogs (but the blog has to be very popular because its only those doing some searching that will be interested in the ads) and much less success on an actual social platform. Ads based on keywords in content are worthwhile if the activity the "clickee" is engaged in is searching for information (Web1.0). But if the published word that is triggering the static ad is part of a conversation that Richard and I are having on his blog about the Wine.com direct shipping whistle blowing debacle...er...debate (hypothetically), then that ad won't be of interest to me. Additionally, straight forward ad networks won't help either. They just lump conversations into categories (either Tags or worse), match advertisers with categories they want to serve ads to in an automated fashion, and then serve away. Its arguable that this is even MORE Web1.0 than keyword advertising. Marketing is being disrupted and its going to take a disruption to this market, not just in the technology but in the approach to marketing, to make online marketing effective in a Web 2.0 world. Cheers!