William Hesketh Lever, the 1st Viscount Leverhulme knew a thing or two. The industrialist who founded Lever Bros, the soap making part of Unilever, said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don't know which half.” And then 60 odd years after he died the internet came along and started serving ads.
Instead of paying $20,000 for a full page, full colour ad or 100 times more for a 30 second TV ad shot by some ponytail with aspirations for Bollywood, you could target your ads. You could buy small ads, irritating pop-up boxes and all sorts targeted exactly at your demographic through keywords (in the case of newspaper sites, Google and Yahoo) or based on demographics with Facebook.
In theory at least.
So where has this wonderful new world taken us? A couple of weeks back I changed my status to “in a relationship” on Facebook. Yet Facebook insists on inviting me to “Meet single women”, inciting infidelity in the budding weeks of a new romance with my former landlady.
Google isn’t much better. On the iPhone I was checking for comments on my podcast on Thai food with chef David Thompson to be confronted with ads for Thai brides. Thankfully, down the track a Thai restaurant has taken the ad slot.
Newspapers sites only really seem to offer me mobile phones, bank accounts, credit cards or cars – none of which I’m in the market for. Yet sometimes, whoever is targeting seems to know too much. How, the Freedictionery knew I had bright yellow teeth I have no idea.
I know that most of these ads are pay per click with between 0.5 per cent and 1.5 per cent of people clicking through -the old junk mail model of targeting. But those clickers just aren’t that good an audience. As I saw last week on Gary’s Subposterous that according to the latest research from the Chitika ad network that stupid people mainly click through on internet ads. It’s the old cliché that everything old is new again.
In other words, half the money you spend on internet advertising is wasted, and the trouble is you don't know which half. Actually, it’s probably worse than that.