Maroon Ventures Blog

Via Greg Sterling, Dynamic Logic research shows consumer reaction to ads in various media. Perhaps surprisingly, consumers are a lot more amenable to ads in traditional media than new, and newspapers are at the top of the heap with 42% of respondents having a “somewhat positive” view of newspaper ads.

Is it time for print to start borrowing some of the measurability that’s common online? Why don’t more papers use 800-numbers in ads so they can track the actual phone calls their ads drive? How about the ability to track e-mail or web responses using proxy server technology (think of something like Tiny URLs in print ads that help the paper measure how many people are going to the advertiser’s site based on what they saw in print)? Online products have been doing this for a long time.

It would be really interesting to see someone buy one of the myriad newspapers on the market based on a pro forma that would allow for a sane, easy to understand rate card that completely rethinks some of the gouging that’s created advertiser disdain for newspapers.

Yes, newspapers have lost much of the marketplace status they once held. But most of them still have significant classified franchises and ad volume. And they have substantial, albeit dwindling, local audience. Cutting rate (sorry, Mark, someone had to say it) might be the right, if counterintuitive, way to re-establish some of that clout with advertising that consumers actually like. What if you coupled this with a compelling online strategy that isn’t afraid to put advertisers on the web — even at the expense of the print product if it makes more sense for the advertiser?

Maybe it’s not too late for a truly innovative — even disruptive — approach to print advertising. But it probably will have to come from someone arriving fresh to the industry with a sober view of the current economics it faces. Recent “fresh” arrivals haven’t followed this route …

Dynamic Logic research results

Greg Sterling discusses Local and the Future of Ad Serving on his Screenwerk blog, and it’s definitely worth a look.

In short, he argues that sophisticated ad serving platforms are moving us much closer to true one-to-one marketing, and the end result will be the ability to mix and match creative on the fly to target specific demographics and behaviors in a very complex — yet easy to execute — process.

“It’s a bit of a “Zen” thing,” Sterling writes. “First there was simplicity, followed by complexity and then there will be simplicity on the other side of complexity.

“In other words, all that the agency and marketer will eventually have to know about digital marketing (including mobile) is that they want to target women, 18-34 who live in New York, San Francisco or Chicago and are interested in certain product categories. They’ll create their ads accordingly. Then they’ll deliver electronic data feeds of their creative and the platform will determine what to show when. They won’t have to figure out much tactically or mechanically. The complexity of the entire system will be in the ‘black box’ of the platform and buried for both the marketer and the end user, who will just see an ad and respond or not respond.”