While browsing though my RSS feeds this morning, I came across an interesting, but dubious article. It was an article written by Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations & Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The article, Why Advertising is Failing on the Internet, strongly expresses the Internet will shatter all forms of advertising. The Internet is not the innovative solution that will resolve challenges in the realm of advertising, but will create more challenges.

“The problem is not the medium, the problem is the message, and the fact that it is not trusted, not wanted and not needed.” This sentence alone sums up what Professor Clemons is trying to express in his article. I can agree to various points in his article, but I will have to challenge the essence of his article.

He provides three points as to why advertising will result in nothing but failure:

1. Consumers do not trust advertising
2. Consumers do not want to view advertising
3. Consumers do not need advertising

First of all I would have to agree that we, as consumers, do not trust advertisements. We are part of a new breed on consumers… we are sophisticated, intelligent and value conscious. We are not motivated to buy because of a banner ad we saw on the side of our Facebook profile or an email we have received from one of our favorite retail stores. We take the time to research, compare and analyze before we have any intent of making a purchase. The way I see it is advertisements are not used as a tool to create trust, but a tool to inform or remind consumers  the existence of a product. This will motivate prospect consumers to do research, compare the advertised products and make a value assessment.

“Consumers do not want to view advertising,” is a true, but over assumptive statement. We use TiVO and spam blockers, because we are ofter annoyed by the amount of advertisements competing against the content we actually want to consume. This, however, does not mean we dislike viewing advertising. We only dislike viewing advertisements that are irrelevant to us. If you were thinking about buying a new car and is not sure of which one to buy, you would probably be interested in viewing ads about cars that are recently released.

Consumers do need advertising, just not too much of it. A good example would be movies. Imagine a world without movie trailers and how it would affect the way dates and weekends are planned. How would people know when what movies are released? It would in fact create an inconvenience. We would have to allocate more time to find out movie release dates and what each movie is about.

The point I am trying to make is consumers have a need to be advertised to, but only with content that is relevant. Just imagine a world with zero (literally) advertisements. Not only would this world be boring, we would need to spend more time on deciding what to buy. How would anyone know what products or brands are available to buy? The concept of brand identity would not exist and we would all be using the same toasters as our neighbors.

I may not be as knowledgeable as Professor Clemons on conducting research on consumer behavior. The one thing that is for certain is I am just as qualified as a general consumer.

If the Internet fits into any part of your marketing mix, I strongly encourage you to read the article and all the comments.

Will V