Attention Dinosaurs: it’s time to rethink your coveted online ads

My kids love to watch the movie, “Chicken Little“.  And we all remember the story, sometimes referred to as The Sky is Falling.  Chicken Little gets hit on the head with something that falls from a tree and mistakenly thinks the sky is falling.  Then he runs around town freaking everyone out until they all realize he’s overreacting.  Wikipedia says that the fable teaches us ‘the necessity for deductive reasoning and subsequent investigation‘.

As I was reading the Advertising Age article, “Social networks sink online-ad pricing”, I couldn’t help but recall the story of Chicken Little.  The article talks about how social networking sites, Facebook in particular, are dominating page views and ad impressions.  But a recent ComScore study shows that social networking sites are drawing an average CPM of $.56 vs. the Internet at large which is at $2.43.

This is my favorite part.  “Some industry executives are concerned that Facebook and its ilk may in fact be reducing the overall pricing of CPMs”. 

Well Boo F’ing Hoo.

If ads on social networking sites aren’t drawing high CPMs because they aren’t working, then maybe finally the online ad industry will realize its time to innovate and rethink the entire model.  Putting commercials in front of people during TV shows back when there were like 5 channels was a successful strategy.  Then people got VCRs.  Then they upgraded to DVRs.  And now commercials on TV are becoming less and less relevant.

So what are we seeing?  More creative content that might start with a TV commercial but then extends to the web in social channels.  Old Spice and Toyota’s Swagger Wagon are great examples of this. We’re also seeing product placement in shows such as the iPad in Modern Family and Cisco’s Teleconference in 30 Rock.  That’s called progress.

Newspapers and magazines are going through this process right now as they realize printed content is becoming less and less relevant.  Online digital magazines and iPad/tablet apps are the early attempts being sought to save this industry.  I’m not sure it will work, but at least there’s an effort going on to innovate.

So let’s stop belly-aching about how online ads are being hurt by social networking and start realizing that flashing up an online ad in front of someone, interrupting what they’re doing on the web, is a flawed model and hanging onto it for dear life is a sure way to find yourself hanging out with the dinosaurs of the past.

If you want to reach people on the web and specifically in social networking, you have to be relevant.  You have to be engaging.  You have to be honest and sincere.  You have to listen.  And you can’t interrupt what they’re doing with your own agenda.

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