Thursday, January 28, 2016

The Ronco Idea-O-Matic.


One of the myriad problems of our age is one of size.

We have taken everything of importance and weight and put it through the fractal media and attention span marketplace.

We have sliced and diced messages, content and ideas to so many disparate units that they are as useful as a dictionary printed on a billion bits of confetti.

This is our world.

We pick presidential candidates based on tweets.

We date based on seven-minute impressions.

More germane to our business, we are forced to do something brand moving or audience shaping or sales driving in a space the size of a match book cover. (Mobile is everything.)

Recently a friend got into a bit of a set-to with a client.

The client had bought some online ad units that were roughly the size and shape of a chopstick. When the client was reviewing the work, they felt it had no impact.

Of course it had no impact.

The best of banners gain about two clicks per 10,000 views.

A sneeze on the subway gets more attention than that.

It's pretty simple IMHO.

If you want big, buy big.

Of course you can do things that punch above their weight.

After all, as I'm sure your mother warned you, you can poke out an eye with that chopstick.

But charting the fate of your company based on the slim chance of a media anomaly is foolish.

Stop slicing ideas into little bits.

What's good for coleslaw is not necessarily good for advertising.




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