Why So Little Relevance?

Why So Little Relevance?
By Dave Morgan


I've written about this topic before, but it keeps coming up -- I heard it a lot during Advertising Week -- so I thought that I should address it again. We all know that online advertising has the capacity to do extraordinary things when it comes to delivering highly addressable and measured advertising. Many of us well remember the DoubleClick trade campaigns in the late '90s about delivering "the right ad to the right person at the right time." The ability of our industry to deliver highly targeted advertising has advanced significantly since those days. Now we have sophisticated search targeting, contextual targeting, behavioral targeting, and e-commerce recommendation engines.

How is it then, many ask, when you go to most Web pages, you get the same old ads that you see everywhere, and you rarely see ads that are truly relevant to you? Conversely, how many times have you browsed to a Web page and exclaimed, "Wow. Those are really great ads!" It happens with television and magazines a whole lot more than it happens on the Web. Only on search results pages do most folks find a whole lot of relevance in ads as a regular part of the experience. Although such ads may not evoke exclamations of "Great ads!" they generally lead to a favorable action for marketers, since they are highly relevant to the user at that moment.

Why is that? Why don't we find more relevant ads online more often, in more places? It is certainly not a matter of technology. We now have ad delivery technologies that can do with ads just about anything that you could imagine.

In my opinion, it isn't the lack of ability to deliver a relevant ad that is holding us back; rather, it is the lack of relevant ads to deliver. We just don't have creative enough arrows in the quiver. We don't have enough different ads with enough unique and differentiating elements that can communicate specific relevant messages to consumers. What can be done? Lots, I believe.

 

Scale. We need more scaled platforms. More scale in the ad delivery platforms, and more coordination of the messages being delivered to the consumers at each point of contact, means a much greater ability to manage relevance at the browser level.


 

Creative Focus. We need much, much more focus on creative. We have seen some taking the lead in this space like Alan Schulman of imc2, but we need many more. We need agencies and advertisers to push harder to create dynamic advertising units that can be segmented to consumers to communicate more relevant messages. Creatives need to focus more and more on building relevance with their messages.


 

Dynamic Creative Technologies. We need more and better technologies to manage better and more sophisticated creatives. Yahoo's SmartAds is a good step. We need more.


 

Restraint. We need publishers, advertisers, agencies and ad networks to show much more restraint in their senseless bombardment of consumers with irrelevant ads. One of the best ways to show consumers that we can deliver more relevance is to stop delivering so much irrelevance. Fewer, more relevant ads; that should be our mantra.