More than a tweet, less than a blog.

So, Fred Wilson wrote a post on new data comparing search and display advertising. The main point is that display is actually pretty good, and used together with search, it’s even better. I wrote this as a comment to his post, but it ended up being so worked thru I figured it deserved to be posted here as well ;) Here we go:

Back in 50s and early 60s the pinnacle of great advertising was considered to be historically proven methods, pre-testing and analysis. Create, measure, evaluate and adjust. Rinse and repeat. Sound familiar?

This was, naturally, before advertising had it’s “creative revolution”, when Bill Bernbach and others showed the world the power in allowing ad creatives to seize power from statisticians and MBA’s, showing that intuition and imagination, not pre-testing and proven methods, could create quant leaps in great advertising.

Over forty years has passed and once again, we’re living in a metric driven, cost-per-click world, where the Internet, despite all it’s creative promise, is increasingly becoming a channel primary for direct-response marketing. “Demand fulfillment”, not “demand creation”. Sure, the Internet is the most precise marketing vehicle ever created, but can you even remember when the last time was you saw a really great web ad?

The Internet has yet to experience it’s creative revolution, which is partly due to ad agencies’ lack of tech knowledge. When we presented at TC50, Marc Andreesen pointed out that ad agencies are “notoriously technology averse”. I live in Sweden, so I’m not sure if this reflects the feeling of the majority of the technology community “over there”, but I get the sense that it might.

However, I think it’s unreasonable for us tech people to expect agencies to keep up with the pace of change for all channels they utilize. They’re focused on communication, not technology, and as long as we expect them to work with tools and interfaces designed for completely different skill sets and lead times (apps and sites), my guess is that we’ll continue to see print and TV ideas adaptations, complemented by a “click now” button ;)

So. It’s up to the people that read blogs like this to create products that decrease the gap between creativity and technology, so that ad creatives can make full use of what our medium has to offer. There are many companies that have promising ideas for improved advertising, specially those working on semantic tech and real-time “data smart” ads. But having looked how they’re packaging their products it’s clear to me that they, like most tech companies with a very rational developer view of the world, have very little knowledge of the workflow in creative advertising agencies.

The NYT said it very well the other day:

“There’s no doubt that there will be a lot of data that can be collected that could be applied to the creative process [but] that’s not necessarily an easy discussion to have with great art directors.”

Coders and copywriters think very differently. And unless we acknowledge this, and start creating products that reflect how “demand creating” advertising works, we’re destined have the search vs. display debate for another two years, continuing to miss the opportunity to trigger version 2.0 of the creative revolution, so that digital media will see the same explosion of advertising ideas, when TV saw the light of day in the 60s.