The difference between search and traditional marketing

January 3, 2006
by Latitude

Robert X Cringely is a highly respected and beloved tech writer – and rightly so. If you haven’t, I would highly recommend picking up his book Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition and Still Can’t Get a Date. (Cringely also hosts the delightfully geeky internet show Nerd TV.) So quite a few people sat up and took notice when he wrote this a few days ago, on how search changes everything. Discussing the difference between how marketing worked BS (no, not that BS; the new BS – Before Search), Cringely writes:

Ad agencies and publications alike knew that many—even most—advertising dollars were simply wasted, but it wasn’t in their interest to admit that, so they didn’t.

Contrast this to pay-per-click, which is brutally honest, where every successful ad has efficacy and advertisers have a pretty darned good idea what they are getting for their money. This reality is precisely why magazines, newspapers, and television are losing revenue to pay-per-click.

Cringely’s conclusions about what this means for print publications are open for debate, but his statement above merely echoes what so many have been waking up to realise lately. May 2006 be the year when quotations like this are no longer needed in explanation of the turning tide of marketing spend.