Positive Aspects of Online Advertising

      While I have previously blogged about some of the negative aspects of online marketing efforts there are many positive aspects online advertising, especially for marketers. First, and most importantly is the interactivity aspect of online efforts. More traditional forms of advertising simply throw a stimulus at groups of consumers, hoping that they will not only be exposed to it, but will also attend to and retain it.

However, online advertising allows two-way communication between businesses and their consumers, allowing companies to better tune their marketing mix to meet customer needs. For example, the Internet provides more outlets for consumer feedback than traditional advertising through things such as online brand communities or email surveys. Also, many websites provide sections for consumers to give product feedback. Other examples include brand communities that encourage consumer conversation about brands and product preferences. These types of outlets are much improved from traditional forms of feedback that surfaced from consumers at a brick and mortar store and had to travel back in the channel to the product producers, which didn't usually happen. No longer are consumers simply expected to idly attend to ads, now they are asked in interact more closely with the brand by talking to other consumers, playing advergames, and allowing the consumer to generate the ads.

Another positive effect of online efforts is the ability to target consumers more precisely and individually, rather than by large demographic or psychographic groups.  For instance, behavioral targeting allows advertisers to track the click patterns and site usage, so they are able to ensure that the ads that are being displayed to users are ads that are relevant to their needs and interests as consumers. Also, affinity targeting allows advertisers to monitor the sites most visited by consumers, being their favorite and most familiar websites. They have found that if they place ads on the sites that individuals favor they will have better impression of the ads displayed and feel that they are more credible. The ability to measure these types of user preferences allows advertisers to individually target consumers, rather than segmenting them as large groups.  For example, Google AdWords allows marketers to precisely track click patterns and has quickly become one of the hottest new ways for companies to track ad effectiveness. They can see how many people actually click on their ad, leading them to the website, and then can also later see if they come back to the website for purchase action. This type of tracking is a much better indication of ad effectiveness than traditional forms that don’t allow for this type of measurability.

Another great aspect of online marketing efforts is that they are lot more cost effective than the expensive forms of traditional ads like newspaper, magazine, or TV ads.  They are also a lot more easily dispersed. For instance, an ad campaign featuring direct mail would take time for the mail to reach each resident, where as the email version of this type of mail can be composed and instantly dispersed to consumers worldwide with the click of a button. For example, if a company decided to do a last minute sale, and were faced with the feat of alerting thousands of customers in time for the sale, advertising using the Internet would be the only viable option.

So although there many be many negatives associated with online advertising, marketers have a lot to gain form the interactivity, targetabilty, and reachability aspects of online marketing.