The Internet’s Pyrrhic Victory Over TV
In our last episode, we talked about how the internet has been chasing direct ad dollars for the bulk of its existence, while failing to attract the brand dollars — that is, the seventy-plus billion dollars spent on television on advertising that encourages, inspires, and cajoles us into buying something: “Just Do It,” vs “10% off! Buy now!”
An intelligent reader might well wonder how a very smart industry missed the boat on a $70 billion portion of a market, while claiming to be reinventing that same market. And you would be right to ask. To be fair, the internet giants have not been ignoring this gigantic market — they’ve been trying to capture it for nearly a decade. The problem is, they haven’t had any success. After a decade of not winning a war, it would not be unreasonable to re-evaluate the tactics being used. Indeed, for the last few years this is exactly what the internet industry has been doing.
Round One: The First Battle of YouTube
But first, a review of history is in order. After their 2004 IPO, Google grabbed more and more of the direct ad dollars that once went to newspapers and magazines. By 2006, they had definitely realized that TV represented a giant pile of money. Thus…
