Razorfish’s Kokich: End the Last-Click Conspiracy

I’m not sure if advertising is dying. But I’m pretty sure nobody will miss it much if it does.
I can remember years ago your then-boss Brian McAndrews telling me the company website would be “the new 30-second spot.” But looking at the numbers, TV advertising is doing great. Most even expect it will fare just fine in a double-dip recession. What’s going on here?
Was Brian wrong? I don’t think so. Sure, television is still important, but is it the central expression of the brand, or is it just one more tool in the kit? As for advertising dying, obviously it’s not. From time to time it still makes sense to spend a lot of money telling people what you want them to hear when you want them to hear it. But is that where people are learning about brands today? To some extent yes, but more and more they’re learning from each other. In this environment, what you say is less important than what you do. As Ben Franklin said, “Well done is better than well said.” And if advertising does die, who will mourn it? Certainly not the consumers who have spent their lives being inundated with irrelevant, repetitive, and just plain old stupid ads. Maybe if we could reduce the volume and increase the quality, things would change, but I don’t see any hope of that happening soon.I can never figure out if I should love or hate Google (the company, not the search engine).
Should agencies, advertisers and publishers still view Google warily? What’s the case for “hating” Google?
As a marketer, it’s easy to love Google. What could be better than being able to reach people at the exact moment they are looking for you, and then to only pay when they actually take some sort of action. Even better, Google (along with all other search engines combined), can provide this miraculous service at scale. Here’s the downside. Google is arguably the biggest benefactor of the “last-click conspiracy.” Despite scores of attribution studies proving search is typically overvalued in the digital media mix, the simple cost/action model is just so darn appealing the industry keeps using it. It seems to work for everyone, except of course for clients, who are misallocating their budgets based on overly simplistic metrics. What’s even more distressing, I sometimes feel we’ve raised a generation of young marketers who believe that direct-response metrics are the be-all and end-all of marketing and brand building. They’re not. Creating and maintaining relationships with loyal customers is a complex, layered activity. Simple cause-and-effect solutions are not enough. Truly transformational ideas still require a healthy dose of insight and imagination. Where will they learn those skills?

It’s hard to come up with a reason why Amazon won’t be successful in the online advertising business.
Data is the new gold, it seems, in online advertising. What’s the big opportunity for a data goldmine like Amazon to become a big player?
One word: Scale. Behavioral targeting is a powerful tool. Direct marketers have known for years that knowing what you do is more valuable in targeting than knowing who you are or what you think. So how have we used that powerful tool? We’ve used it to saturate our best customers with the same message over, and over, and over. Why? Because we just can’t find enough of them. Amazon will help to solve that problem. Amazon knows what people do, and they know it for a huge percentage of the population. Amazon won’t replace other tools, but my bet is its ability to implement behavioral-targeting at scale will be met with open arms in the marketplace.