Internet advertising... it's a wonderful thing.



From its humble beginnings as the pretty pictures that popped up on your screen without so much as a kindly request for permission, or when you were distracted enough to click on any old link, Internet advertising was the bold new way to make your potential customers really, really angry.

That's the problem with new technology. When it first hits we tend to try and force it into our old model of doing business. After all, if you hit a square peg hard enough, and often enough, it will fit into a circular hole... and with only the minor side effects of rounded edges or excessive pressure on all sides. Eventually it will break apart, but for now, at least, it's stuck in there.

The point is that not only does technology evolve, but eventually we have to as well. And when we finally catch up with the technology, our ideas about what Internet advertising ought to be and ought not to be have experienced their own evolution.

It wasn't the smoothest evolution ever. Of course, most natural evolution gets billions of years to sort everything out. We couldn't wait that long. There was money to be made, after all. Internet advertising had to move a lot faster than nature.

As progress was made we even evolved a contemporary lexicon to keep up with the changes. SPAM, White Hat and Black Hat SEO, Web 2.0, social networking and on and on. And that doesn't even count the endless acronyms that are accepted communication.

Advertising on the Internet has evolved to make use of the wide range of opportunities afforded by growing technology and growing dependence on that technology. And Internet advertising budgets have steadily increased to meet the inherent potential.

Pop-ups have developed a stigma and most advertisers stay away from them, and pop-unders are, well, right behind them. Banner ads seemed like the way to go for a while, but it's amazing how selective the average consumer's attention can be. And advertisers who chose floating ads to make sure that their advertisement was noticed were just re-employing the old pop-ups with a shiny new veneer. Most consumer reaction, though, had nothing new or shiny about it.

Somewhere in there a major evolutionary link had been missed in Internet advertising. Marketers were still trying to ram their message down a potential customer's throat. And just making the sides a little shinier doesn't make it any easier to swallow.

Magazine, radio, and TV are the mediums for random advertisements on the shotgun theory ? which states that if your message is out there enough, getting to enough people, eventually you will convince someone to buy your product.

The Internet doesn't work like that.

Not anymore.

While it is true that some people are just surfing the net at random, it's not like surfing the channels on TV. With a remote in hand and nothing better to do, the television viewer is ready to let other people show him or her something they deem important or interesting.

Not so for the Internet user. When the common Internet user gets online, there is usually a general, if not very specific, thing they are looking for. They are not interesting in having something forced on them. People use search engines because they want to find something.

A savvy Internet advertising campaign, then, will take advantage of this. And in recent history we've seen the escalation of this kind of marketing. Blogs, social networking, and social bookmarking are just a few of the recent trends. All these methods actually involve the customer, and simply make their products extremely available.

And now we've uncovered the missing evolutionary link. It's no longer a matter of convincing a customer you have something they want. It is a matter of making your site available to the customer who is already looking for it. The savvy customer has grown to distrust Internet advertising, but they will be far more likely to trust decisions they feel are their own.