Sponsors

April 3, 2009

Comments (6)

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My college just started advertising with Google and, through web advertising, as more than doubled the number of students applying for admission.

Posted by Peter | April 3, 2009 8:28 AM

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I don't think the good professor understands what advertising is. It is not only a commercial that is run in a pop-up window, which is like a commerical on TV that you have the option of ignoring. It is also the banner ads, search engine placement, online classifieds and anything else which places a product or service into top of mind awareness. The arguement that you now have the option of ignoring the advertising is absurd. We've had the option of ignoring TV commercials since the invention of the remote control and that hasn't stopped the advertising on TV. The benefit of the internet is you have more sources of information available. But more information doesn't cancel out advertising. It enhances it.

Posted by Marty Czech | April 3, 2009 8:33 AM

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Professor Clemons misses the boat completely. Advertising on the web allows expanding the market advertised to as well as targeting those ads to specific audiences.

For example, Leo Laporte has a dozen podcasts on a number of subjects on his TWIT network. TWIT is This Week In Tech. For this economic downturn, he prepared for the income to be reduced but that didn't happen. Instead, his ad revenue went UP.

Even so, one of the problems he has is that the advertisers don't seem to understand that material on the web has a World Wide audience. As a result, He has to figure out how many of his podcasts downloads are from the US in order to determine what to charge advertisers. The Advertisers just don't get it.

Ask Leo all about this for a future tense soon. His equipment is probably better then yours so he should sound just as good as you on your podcast. He is a radio man after all.

http://twit.tv/
http://techguylabs.com

Posted by David Eckard | April 3, 2009 1:30 PM

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Speaking as someone who manages an extensive B2B online advertising campaign - and who has an MBA, albeit not from the professor's school - I find this absurd.

It's really unclear whether he's arguing that advertising doesn't work, or that the economics of advertising do not support freely available content (which is a reasonable point).

I carefully track the revenue we're getting form our advertising, and guess what? It pays off.

B-school professors need to talk to actual businesspeople now and then.

Posted by John | April 4, 2009 8:13 AM

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I think that the previous posters are telling themselves what you want to hear. Professor Clemons (1) cites surveys done from reputable companies that clearly show that people in general do not find internet advertising credible, and (2) makes the argument that we, as web surfers, have the freedom and will power to simply not see these advertisemnets at all. I think the point he's trying to make is that it is almost impossible for a web site to sustain on ad sales alone (as so many do).

Posted by Wally | April 8, 2009 10:03 AM

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I was left frustrated listening to this episode. Mr. Clemens seems to have this whole thing figured out until when asked what the alternate models are. His response was left wanting. So according to the professor, people have to start to realize that all their favorite online sites may eventually not be free and may cost consumers. OK, and ... how is he proposing that be done? He never says.

If this scenario was true then the question needs to be asked, does charging everyone to go to a site suddenly make the internet not as popular and do we then start looking to some other sort of newer medium which may be free?

Posted by bq | April 13, 2009 7:39 AM