PPC has made many people forget how normal advertising works

[ogletree]

PPC has made many people forget how normal advertising works. PPC has been the small guy for a long time. Now that big players that have large budgets and understand the value of advertising we are seeing costs go up. When I advise small companies on PPC they never seem to understand it is not all about connecting exact clicks with sales. It is a lot more complicated than that. People who understand advertising know it is more about cost of acquiring a customer. A customer is more than just one sell. A real business wants repeat business. Many PPC advertisers are only concerned about a single sell. You need to look at average cart size and customer retention. The overall goal is to have a successful business not a good day.

[jsinger]

Actually a lot of "normal" B/M advertising simply aimed to make a fast buck. Those were the good old days! We used to do mailers that paid for themselves in 2 or 3 days. A $500 newspaper ad could increase our sales by thousands of dollars the week it ran. You don't need an MBA to do the math on that kind of advertising!

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The new-fangled "life time value" notions were employed in the late 90s to justify outrageous advertising of IPO-wealthy Dot Coms. I'm thinking specifically of the orgy of ads that appeared during the early Dot Com Era Superbowls, 1999-2001.

Advertisers included startup OurBeginning.com which was out of business by 2002. Pets.com, WebMD.com Computer.com Hotjobs. Britannica.com. Monster.com

"Mitch Davis, senior vice president of marketing for Britannica.com, is amazed by the "irrational marketing" expenditures exhibited by the wet-behind-the-ears dot-coms. "In two or three years, we're going to look back and wonder how the hell did a company with $6 million in capital spend half of it in less than two minutes," he says. But when he admits, "I have the luxury of saying that because we have a brand" -- implying that Britannica is justified in spending millions on ads just because it has a long history of doing so -- he sounds just as delusional as the unknown start-up founders who continue to argue that the Super Bowl was a fabulous investment."

[piatkow]

In pre web days I used to run a regular music event. I always maintained (and still do) that it is the simplist thing in the world to get a punter through the door ONCE. The hard work was in making them come back again, preferably with friends who also come back with their friends.

Holds true for any business, B&M or web.

[jsinger]

Here's a guy who really thought long term in going for the holy grail of Dot Com era advertising, "marketing buzz."

Video from 2000 Superbowl is about all that remains of Ourbeginning.com's multi million buck ad kitty.
[youtube.com...]

OurBeginning paid Disney $1 million [to create!] for its four spots and a fifth that Super Bowl viewers won't see. ABC's censors found its language offensive and rejected it, citing "antisocial behavior," Budowski notes. For OurBeginning, it's a case either of exquisite luck or shrewd marketing, because the company plans to post the banned ad on its Web site as a means of generating additional traffic. "It never hurts for people to be talking about an ad too risque for TV," says David Blum, a vice-president at Eisner Communications. In another effort to drive traffic, OurBeginning will pay $250,000 to a lucky Web surfer who registers at its site. Budowski says he hopes to create a data base of 5 million customers, including many who heard about the site on the big game.

"http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/0001/mk3666136.htm"