We’ve Forgotten That Where We Run Our Ads Matters
Digital has ignored the theory of signaling — to the detriment of both advertisers and society. Where a customer is, is crucial.
In a column of January of this year, journalist Walt Mossberg relayed a story that probably sounds all too familiar to many publishers:
About a week after our launch, I was seated at a dinner next to a major advertising executive. He complimented me on our new site’s quality and on that of a predecessor site we had created and run, AllThingsD.com. I asked him if that meant he’d be placing ads on our fledgling site. He said yes, he’d do that for a little while. And then, after the cookies he placed on Recode helped him to track our desirable audience around the web, his agency would begin removing the ads and placing them on cheaper sites our readers also happened to visit. In other words, our quality journalism was, to him, nothing more than a lead generator for target-rich readers, and would ultimately benefit sites that might care less about quality.
Digital has made targeting the holy grail of advertising. We have discussed in previous columns why this is a flawed approach for big brands. For a large brand, targeting is largely useless: every consumer is a potential customer for your brand…
