Everyone has their media annoyances. Here are some of mine.
Misrepresentation of audience composition as pageview composition. The fact that a site may be predominantly reaching women, for example, does not mean that the actual pageviews (and hence impressions) generated by women are in the same proportion. A site may very well reach 80% women, which may only generate 10% of impressions on the site. In other words, a minority demographic may account for the majority of impressions. If you buy the site you end up with 10% of women and not 80% as per reach.
Last click syndrome. Most advertisers still attribute all actions to the last impression or click. If a person has been exposed twice to a creative, spent 10 minutes on a site but then a week later ended up searching on Google and buying, that last click usually accounts for the conversion. Non-click conversions, offline spend, and all other channels need to be part of standard reporting. Otherwise you end up using Google’s report which tells you to spend more with Google.
Social media marketing. Not sure I grasp the idea of marketing being the act of emailing your blogger friends so that they post about something your client is paying you to promote. The whole area of “social marketing” still feels like an awkward infomercial where brands try to get people to talk to them about how much they love the products (or at least mention the products), while other people are supposed to care. We need better tools, better understanding of audiences and better ways of fair, transparent advertising that would actually allow big brands to support micro-publishers and their readers. Let’s develop those instead of talking about blogging and how important blogs are and how it’s changing the world, shall we? It’s 2008, let’s move on.
