Guy Kawasaki’s $1.39 CPM and the Online Advertising Industry
This week I read this article on author Guy Kawasaki getting a CPM of $1.39 compared to the CPM of $100 commanded by sites such as Forbes.com or BusinessWeek.com. It gets me thinking that even though more and more people are spending more and more time on the web, advertisers are not taking advantage of the online opportunity.
Guy Kawasaki, a famous author and consultant is in the top 50 of bloggers on the Internet according to Technocrati, 21,000 people receive RSS feeds via Feedburner and 1,457 receive emails via FeedBlitz. The fact that this blog of all blogs is not earning more is shocking.
This paired with the recent Marketing Sherpa report that shows Direct Mail (DM) leading the pack as far as Marketing spend is concerned upsets me. Direct Mail? You mean those envelopes people receive and throw them away without opening them? Isn’t this killing trees for no reason? DM is ahead of broadcast, and spending on it is many times higher than any kind of Online marketing.
My conclusion from this is that Online Marketing is still in its infancy, whereas mediums like Direct Mail have had centuries to evolve and grow. With the ability to measure online results so precisely, you would think that more marketers would go this route instead of the traditional DM channel. Perhaps since DM is safe and predictable, and there are many well-seasoned Marketing Managers who understand it, decision-makers don’t see the need for change.
But – I think there is definitely some room to grow and innovate within Marketing. Still relying on DM is like still programming mainframe applications. Of course there are subject-matter experts, but that is no reason to keep the whole industry in the dark ages. Eventually as more advertisers see the benefits of online and as the online advertising industry continues to innovate, we will see more online ads… and less junk mail at our doorsteps.
Thanks for visiting SmallBizPod earlier. I’m glad you did too, because you’ve got some cracking posts here.
Perhaps I’m overly cynical, but could the precise measurement offered by online advertising be a reason why advertising agencies/marketers prefer other forms such as DM. Traditional print advertising and DM response rates etc are usually based on measurements designed by the advertisers themselves. TV and print I would imageine is also much more profitable from an agency point of view.
Apols to any ad agency people reading this, but my father worked for the world’s biggest agencies and left me with a rather jaundiced views.
That sounds like a pretty realistic theory – although I have seen many times clickthus reported by agency to be astronomically higher (over 15x) that of internal reports… so they are cheating the system anyway. But it is not as easy as other mediums such as television.
Thanks for your kind words – they made my day!