It's about more than getting clicks

[by Todd] In case you missed it there was a lengthy piece in Monday's WSJ talking about how consumer package goods are moving money from television to interactive marketing. The gist of the story was that brand managers finally have an audience and the tools to measure how marketing online affects sales.

My problem with the story (why would I be talking about it two days later if I didn't have a problem with it?) was that it continues to take a simplistic view of marketing online. The view is something like this, big ad means lots of clicks, means success. Consider this passage:

One Axe ad on Heavy.com promoted a cable-TV program produced by Axe about a fictional secret society called The Order of the Serpentine. The large ad showed a young man in a bathrobe with ghost-like women clutching at his legs. It took consumers who clicked on it to a site for the show that heavily promotes Axe's Snake Peel shower scrub.

But the article misses the point. This campaign wasn't about getting clicks. Just spend a few minutes on The Order of the Serpentine and you'll see what I mean. Axe's campaigns have been a sophisticated mix of tactics meant to engage their customers fantasy lives with humor, tactile experiences and unexpected experiences. I'd dare say the banner ad mentioned in the story was the most pedestrian piece of the campaign.

When it comes to interactive marketing, for some reason many marketers, their agencies, and even the trade press continue to miss the the key question. Yes, the Internet now consumes 15% of the time consumers spend with media. And, true it has grown faster than any mass media before it. But the question any one in marketing has to address is why? Why are people so engrossed with the online world.

The answer -- control. No other media offers such a range of options as the Internet. You can get a quick answer with search engine, read opinions on virtually any topic, chat with friends, play games, and yes, even watch video. No two people use computers the same way, and that is fundamentally different than all other forms of communication.

So why, why do marketers continue to believe that success for Internet advertising has to look like a TV commercial?

While marketers like Pepsi, Betty Crocker and Jell-O got marks for recognizing the shifting consumer landscape, I found it remarkable no one in the article discussed how best to use the new technology. Indeed, most of the examples seemed perpetuate the myopic view that online advertising means better banner ads or streaming video commercials.

Wake up people. Engage your customers. Don't talk at them, inform them, entertain them, reward them. Give them a reason to talk back to you. AND THEN LISTEN!

This isn't a zero-sum game for marketers. Television will continue to be a critical component in any campaign to build awareness. But savvy marketers will realize that putting the pieces together requires a deeper understanding of what their customer is doing online.

Here's a great example from a second-tier player in the home cleaning market, Xtra-Pine a product from Alen Americas, a company that sells primarily to the Hispanic community. But you can be sure their share is growing. Rather than battle the titans such as Pine-Sol head-to-head, Alen America's agency, Ole, did a television commercial mocking the Mr. Clean stereotype. It drove to a web site called CleaningHunk.com. (Ironically Ole takes a rather dim view of agency sites on their site, www.wehavenowebsite.com.)

The site has an intuitive understanding of how its target market uses the Internet. Take a look at how prominent the forward to a friend link is on the site. Writing in the BusinessWeek blog David Kiley hits the nail on head about this campaign:

What is more valuable?....An ad for which P&G spends $300,000 to reach an audience of five million viewers, with a fraction of those actually paying attention or watching at all...or an ad that, in the end, may draw millions who actually sought the ad out on the Net and passed it to their friends. A pine cleaner ad!

Marketers and agencies, your competitors are serving you a wake-up call. Are you listening?