AdAge Claims Online Advertising is Overhyped

And I don’t agree with it.

Their first argument is this one:

The inconvenient truth is that for all its new-media spin, display advertising is “old” media — a commercial message to be placed next to editorial or entertainment content. And we know by now that measured-media growth has pretty much ground to a halt as marketers continue to increase their dollars in unmeasured disciplines such as web development, public relations and database marketing at the expense of paid advertising.

Well, I think there is a huge different between an ad that appears on a paper newspaper and ones that appear on the online website of that same newspaper. For one thing, the results of the latter are much more measurable. You can track how many times the ad got displayed. How many people clicked on the ad. How many people ended up purchasing a product after that click. Heck, you could even know the country, browser and operating system of the people that saw the ad.

When hard economic times come, companies will want to spend their money in places where they can track the results more efficiently.

The the article questions:

Sure, dollars are shifting within those media budgets, with some moving out of traditional media into interactive. But most of the top 100 advertisers that wield the big budgets are still primarily TV and print spenders. The question is: Should the fact Procter & Gamble spends only 1.5% of its marketing budget on display ads be viewed as a warning signal by online ad sellers, or as an opportunity

The author of the article apparently thinks that this is a warning signal, he goes: “For all its glory, the internet still has not proven itself capable of being a primary branding medium.”

Well I think he is wrong, I think that the fact that the advertisers still spend 90% of their money on television is definitely an opportunity for online advertising. Why? Because eventually everything is going to migrate to the web. That is, everything is going to travel on IP. Your television, your telephone conversations, and even the bits that your fridge will send to the local supermarket when you run out of beer cans.

Sure it might still take some years for that to realize, but it is a matter of when and not a matter of if.

As a result, I think that online advertising will keep growing strong, and perhaps new forms of advertising will emerge, but they will certainly be based on web technologies.

Anyway you can read the full article here and take your own conclusions.