Advertising Is Water: A Special Report on the Future of Marketing
October 26, 2011 by Kevin Michael Gray
Everyone has a million dollar idea but it's the one in a million stick-to-it-ive persons that can translate the idea into a bonafide company and passive revenue stream. Today's featured article comes from theatlantic.com and discusses some futures for marketing. Read more below:
One evening in late summer, my roommate told me he wanted to design a Web app. I asked him how he planned to turn his idea into a business. "We'll make money with ads," he said. This sounded like the right answer. Twitter uses ads. Foursquare uses ads. Facebook is flirting with a $80 billion valuation based on its potential for ad revenue. And it's not just the young guns playing this game. Google still derives more than 90 percent of its revenue from Web ads. The entire online news industry, the same one that pays my salary, gives away almost all of its content for free and relies on ad display to pay the bills. Still, I remember being struck by my friend's confidence that advertising would support his business. I was on my computer at the time, listening to Spotify, an ad-supported music network, with a TV show paused on Hulu, an ad-supported entertainment site. My browser was open to more than ten tabs, each for an ad-supported site, like Facebook or CNN. The television was on mute, and while I can't remember what was playing at that moment, we can safely assume there was some silent messaging seeping into the living room, since three out of every ten minutes of network TV are devoted to ads. So here we were, sitting in a thick swirl of marketing campaigns, and my friend was telling me that, of course, there was always more money to squeeze from the American ad machine... Was he being crazy or obvious? *** Depending on how you define the word, advertising is as old as language. Historians place the first printed ad (for a prayer book) in 1472, and the first newspaper ad (a reward for lost horses) in the mid-17th century. But it was 5,000 years ago that the ancient Babylonians identified some of their most important buildings with clearly written words. This doesn't sound like a terribly savvy act of marketing, but calling attention to a thing is the very definition of advertising. After all, the word we use comes from the French advertir: to call attention.
READ FULL ARTICLE
