Marketing vs. Advertising, and Google.

[I left a smaller version of this post over on apophenia's article about the implications of ad-clicking (which, in turn, links to a good article whose necessity in 2007 is a bit saddening). Here's the longer and more disjoint version, links added. I'll build this into a more complete form, over the coming weeks.] I think there is a difference between marketing and advertising, and that difference is illustrated between Google and ads (even the ones on Google). But first, some personal bias (apologies for the long detour): I had a run-in with that .001x of the web base, about 10 years ago, and I find it highly amusing that the advertising people's efforts to pollute web pages end up with that demographic as their main "customers"... I was in Little Rock on business, and had stayed an extra day to see/hear a current President (Clinton, at this time) speak that morning. So, I slept late, and didn't make it downstairs in time to get to the speech. In the meantime, I stopped into the gift shop to pick up a paper, and found it full of...Beanie Moms. Recall, this was when those plushy toys were popular and were considered "collectibles" (early runs likely still are, etc). There must have been 20 of them, glaring at each other with hostility and suspicion. Between them and the merchandise of the gift shop, there was about 8 people worth of floorspace remaining. They honestly looked like dogs who knew they were about to fight over a steak. So, between bothering Secret Service agents with pointless questions, and harassing Beanie Moms, I chose the more dangerous route. As it turned out, the gift shop recieved a shipment of beanies each week on that day. The collected assembly of angry, big-haired women, who had obviously become quite accustomed to their world revolving around them, had signed up for a draft, the order of which would be selected at random. Since Beanie Babies followed some form of rarity schedule (like CCGs, etc.), this meant that draft order directly related to net gain, whether from resale or trade leverage. Each Beanie Mom was absolutely pissed off at every other Beanie Mom in the place, for having the nerve to show up for that week's draft. I ended up fishing a Beanie Baby from the wooden barrel of neglected, "common" beanies, located in the back corner of the store. The collected, palpable hatred of the room was then focused on me, as the cashier registered my purchase ahead of the two or three people remaining in line to sign up for the draft. I left, somewhat surprised that I walked out of the shop in one piece. I've also been stuck within earshot of a lunch meeting of "search advertisers", and found the sight both amusing and depressing. I consider Marketing to be ultimately concerned with delivering product/service from supplier to consumer (using both terms in the general sense). I consider Advertising as a means of establishing and maintaining demand from the consumer side, by "cultivating" mindshare. When Advertising people inflate their role to that of actual marketing, you find notions that ads have currency beyond mindshare; click-through as a performance metric is a shining example of this conceit. Consider the following, highly simplified, purchase pattern: Needs/wants --drive-> customer tendencies --to-> search/consider --then-> buy/lease/subscribe --and-> review their choice . While ads can be inserted anywhere in this chain, Advertising remains a subset of the needs/wants drivers. Period. Search engines live in the search/consider phase, and bank on the transitions between search and buy. Therefore, as a search engine, Google is Marketing. The ads that show up on search engines are riders. As applied to the Web: I consider the hyperlink (and downstream order management, etc.) as marketing, and content surrounding that link as advertising. As the linked article points out: ...since the audience has already been highly qualified by their search term and is .hand-raising. ... it is logical to focus on a click as a very good proxy for the generation of a qualified lead... Not the case ... where the audience is not in an active search- and-buy mode. As far as capitalization {advertisers preying on web users} goes: I find it difficult to believe that Web users are being taken advantage of, for choosing to navigate via hyperlinks (marketing) that have a picture/noise/animation/slogan (advertising). That behavior might be a sign of disadvantage of some kind, but I think advertiser-induced disadvantage would result in a growing percentage of users with that condition.

posted at: 22:45 | permanent link to this entry

Today's topic for discussion is:

Spice Girls, or Snorg Girls?

posted at: 16:38 | permanent link to this entry