Online Increasingly Used To Build Brand Awareness

from the it's-about-time dept

In early 1998, Techdirt did some scenario planning for the online advertising industry, and one of the things we came up with was that the industry was too focused on "clickthroughs". The idea was that people go to a destination webpage because they're looking for info on that page, and don't necessarily want to go elsewhere. Furthermore, in no other advertising medium did advertisers expect an immediate, direct response. Instead, they realized it was for "branding" purposes. It appears that it only took five and a half years, but this message is starting to get through. DoubleClick is now saying that, while clickthroughs are going down, more advertisers see online ads as ways to build their brand. Unfortunately, this seems to mean annoying "rich media". Personally, the only time I "interact" with an advertisement is to get it to stop making noise - with a few small exceptions, like the recent Honda ad that I (and many others) actually went and looked for online.