Digital’s Biggest Hurdle: Scale
Posted by Greg on February 10, 2009
In response to Dan’s post, I think the biggest problem digital advertising has faced in claiming a bigger piece of marketers’ budgets is its inability to scale up. Yes, it’s more efficient, measurable, targeted and all those things. And certainly a startup such as Guyville would want to focus all its efforts online. But if you’re a large company looking to really move the needle on sales, there aren’t many options that can do the job better than an ad on primetime TV or a large print campaign in a national magazine.
It’s not that the Web doesn’t have a big enough audience. But there aren’t really any sites that aggregate that audience the same way that popular TV shows do. To cite two example, Facebook has a huge audience, but so far it has underwhelmed as an advertising platform. Google, meanwhile, has the audience and and an effective platform, but the ads are so targeted that it can be difficult to scale effectively.
That said, Dan is definitely right that now is the right time to shift ad dollars online. In a bad economy, gargantuan ad budgets will likely be pared down, and marketers will need to demonstrate ROI and prove themselves as revenue centers rather than cost centers. And unlike in the last recession, I think online marketing may have finally matured to the point where it can more effectively absorb ad dollars.
