More Replacements for Advertising
We talk a lot about alternatives to traditional advertising. While we’ve focused mainly on companies providing (and branding) useful services on the internet to their customers, that’s certainly not the only avenue to explore. I love the idea of businesses taking their ad budgets and engaging in projects that are focused on the public good. (Note: our own Carbon Grove as an example.) The Good Blog talks about this direction:
These are scary days if you’re in the ad business, and not because the economy has bolted out from under us and off into a canyon. No, it’s scary because on the other side, there’s more terror still, because even when consumers begin to buy again, it’ll be harder to reach them. They don’t buy print media; they skip past television ads using their DVRs; they ignore pop-ups and banner ads online. And even if they’ve noticed your ads and go shopping for your gizmo, your $300 million ad-spend might be undone by a single, anonymous reviewer on Amazon: “This product sucks.”
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Ben
January 26, 2009 at 10:16 am
I think that if somebody has 300 million for an ad spend, then they should also have the money to make the product awesome and have more than a single review :)
From my perspective as a consumer, a lot of companies want to replace engineering with marketing. You need to do both well to make a lot of money (look at Apple).
Some people think that their product is “good enough” and therefore assume that more marketing will solve the problem. But sometimes making the product better is the best marketing of all.
Amazon prime is an interesting example of this. I buy tons of stuff from Amazon because I can get it delivered free in 2 days. I have heard that this was done as a marketing spend originally.