Is Digital Dying? Why Marketers Need To Make A Strategic Shift
You’re probably reading this article over
the snare of an entire ambush protocol in digital advertising. The
margin crawl of your monitor or the white space of your phone screen is
under siege by aggro outreach tactics in hero banners, remarketing ads,
hi-def video overlays firing off below the fold of your browser, gumming
up your bandwidth in service of the 30-second product pitch. In recent
years, the entire scheme of modern pop ad campaigns has run the internet
over with a veritable battery of pay-per-click displays, trick banners,
rich media, pop-ups, all manner of text ads, hyperlinks and browser
cookies.
I don’t know what you’re up to on the internet these days — surfing
cat videos, online shopping or maybe looking to get to the bottom of a
strange pain behind your ears and logging your symptoms into WebMD. It’s
none of my business. Though I can tell you, just short of cruising the
dark web or hacking time-bomb files in some unlit corner of a state
department server, you’re going to cross the spiel of every corporate
marketing arm, from big pharma to mail-order underwear.Digital advertising is set to account for about 54% of all U.S. ad spend this year, and this exposure is likely only going to increase. This means your content will continue to be more crowded, and the fight to rent cheap space in the hearts and minds of the all-American consumer class will likely heat up against the modern click war of digital ad space.
Look to the left of your screen; look to the right of your screen. Check right below the main navigation bar; then look just above the footer of a page. Is the content you’re trying to read often behind the digital graffiti of some animated pop-up or Flash-driven action call? What does all this say about the state of our digital ad space in 2019? Have we finally arrived at the maximum saturation point for effective communication, all of it locked in contention, screaming in unison — a void of chatter, hack persuasion and consumer mistrust developing at the levers of a callous AdWords money-grab? Is digital dying?
If you want my two cents, you could just as easily look to the title of this very piece. If you want something cold and hard in terms of data, you can always check the census on the inevitable decline of web-based content engagement. In its very first iteration, the banner ad saw a 44% click rate, sure, but the internet has exploded since AT&T introduced the world to our very first hero ad in 1994, and things got about as bleak as Detroit real estate.
Right now, we’re looking at a deficit in terms of user interest. Innovation and originality are slowing to the natural stasis of ubiquity. The average click-through rate (CTR) globally is reportedly 0.16%, but I’ve seen estimates that as many as 50% of clicks on banner ads are unintentional. According to data reported on by MarketingWeek, only 9% of digital ads get eyes on them for more than a second. And Reuters found that 35% of internet users in the U.S. under the age of 35 use ad blockers.
As far as I’m concerned, the entire landscape of cheapo click-driven conversion campaigns is falling out of favor with end users in a new era of streamlined user experience (UX) and cleaner content platforms.
So then, where does all this leave us? Do we continue hammering through, beating back the collateral curtain of the modern industrial marketing complex through a whole protocol of Adblock extensions, cookie crunchers and pop-up killers? As marketers, do we continue vying for a share of voice over the digital gall and racket of “buy, buy, buy” clamoring up every corner of the web?
Truth is, I can’t sit here and prescribe any kind of nontraditional digital marketing strategy without taking into account all manner of variables across budget, ad spend, industry, audience, etc. What I can predict is the inevitable shift toward more meaningful and informative content and an organic exchange of ideas around products and services.
Just the other day, Google announced the BERT search algorithm update, its biggest move in more than five years. With an all-new neural networking technique, this update is set to equip Google with an artificial intelligence-based language accelerator to help the site understand and analyze the intentions behind search queries. This means Google is now able to interpret the meaning behind full sentences instead of just crawling keyword sequences to provide more relevant search results.
In an era where trust is quickly eroding in the realm of pop-up ads, and more people are turning to native content to learn about products, this could be a game-changer in the evolution of e-commerce. In fact, 87% of content marketers already find native advertising to be somewhat or extremely effective.
Now that Google is quickly removing the barriers to intent-based communications, are we going to change the way we think about outreach? Is Google cannibalizing its own revenue model in service of organic appeal? Only time will tell.
All this data tells me that companies seem to be ramping up when it comes to display ads, with only a handful of industries really benefitting from dynamic data-driven content in this arena. The internet was engineered for vast and unending evolution and, as marketers, I think it’s our job to audit the landscape every now and again and ask ourselves if we’re ready for what’s next.
Web Development Company in Vail CO develops high-performing, conversion-driven websites that are bound to transform your business.
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