I was just flicking through "The Economist" (An old edition from May 10th Edition 2008) and got stuck on the adverts. Well I work in an interactive Ad agency so I suppose that it's a professional misfortune to make this type of comment. Even though this is from a year ago it still happens that you see ads like this with no URL or at the best a URL that is for the company and not the product. I can't understand why, on so many adverts, which will have cost the companies advertising a fair amount of money, there is no continuity or synergy with the online, no link to a website. I checked 2 consecutive adverts with no URLs, (no links to websites). I then looked through several pages and many had URLs but these two were for HSBC and Chevron had nothing and I can't understand why there would be an advert created for a magazine that could not/would not be relayed on line.
When I was working on an automobile account in a web agency recently I found out that less than 5% of the ad budget was spent for online advertising, the majority being spent for TV then outdoors with online getting below 5%. I know many people still spend a lot of time in front of the TV but is 5% a real fit for the Internet currently ? Can you really create an effective online campaign to reach the numbers that are currently spending a large amount of their time online with such a small amount of the overall Ad budget ?
Even if it is an appropriate reflection of how people spend their time, I still deplore the lack of synergy that occurs between TV and outdoor ads versus online. Triggering people's appetite to engage and continue the experience of a well thought through campaign online is so easy and yet so few companies actually do it. How many full blown campaigns that really use the potential for intelligently using TV, outdoors, radio etc. and online come to mind. Very few for most people because that type of synergy between Medias is very rare. Search Engine Optimisation may be a buzz word at the moment as it provides increased numbers of visitors when done properly but synergies the 360° type synergies between offline and online are way more effective in immersing people in your message!
If you can think of some cool synergies in your country please let me know and share the examples !
🙂
