A Banner Year for TV Ads
I was never one for watching sports on TV--as you know,
you never would have married me otherwise--but the older I get, the more I
enjoy it. OK, I admit, my main purpose in watching baseball is I find it an
extremely effective way of falling asleep--far better than, say, golf, which at
least provides interesting scenery from time to time. But football, there's a
spectator sport that I really enjoy (though this year, with the Jets flailing
so miserably, it has been painful, tragic, and somewhat dull).
However, in my most unflinchingly honest moments, I
believe there is something else that draws me so inexorably to sports TV: The
commercials. Especially, as I've said to you more times than you care to
remember, the ads for online stuff. Is there anything funnier than that online brokerage ad that shows the kid
with the purple hair teaching his boss to make his first trade? No, not even
the Budweiser beer lizards. (Oh come on, you love them, too.) And what about
those over-the-top ads for Outback.com, which showed wolverines being turned
loose on a marching band? Or those great IBM e-business ads--I love those! The new one with the guy sitting on a bench terrifying
pigeons because he's shrieking into his cell phone while peering through a
Brazil -esque, crystalline eyeglass-mounted monitor
... I need one of those! I have to have one!
Now comes the story in this morning's Times about how online retailers are going nuts this holiday
season, spending an unprecedented amount of dough buying TV ads. Millions and
millions of dollars, a Saganesque amount of money. It's a great story. My
favorite example: eToys, which brought in a meager $2 million in sales during
its first year of business, sold more than $24 million worth of toys during
last year's fourth quarter alone. Why? The Times
says a TV ad showing parents clicking their way down their kids list to Santa
made the difference. Indeed, there's been a growing sense among online
e-tailers (and everyone else who advertises online) that banner ads simply
don't drive traffic. When I used to run the Netly
News and used to watch our ad traffic (and every other number) with daily
horror, I had a theory: That the vast majority of people who hit ad buttons ...
do so accidentally.
I'm not alone, apparently. Last year, more than 80
percent of the money online sites spent in advertising was spent online; this
year that money is being spent on TV and traditional advertising, the
Times says. Amazon is spending more than $100
million in old-style advertising this holiday season alone. This is a bad
trend, needless to say, for content sites like
Slate
. If people won't pay for
subscriptions and advertisers won't pay for banner ads, where does that leave
us?
