New Paradigms Abound

By any measure, conventional advertising is in the dumpster.

If your daily newspaper still exists, it’s probably 25 percent the thickness it was three years ago.  TV network sales people scramble for advertising dollars amid competition from cable.  Advertising agencies are downsizing, merging and drying up all over the world.

However, today’s B to C and B to B marketing environments are as vibrant as ever.  Advertising budgets are probably as high as ever with some recession adjustments. What is happening is that information has moved from the off-line to the on-line world and information and programming has always been the loss-leader for advertising. Thus, the advertising messages are embedded or included in the news and feature content within the on-line world.

The Google organization is perhaps the greatest visionary in this new world of advertising.  Readers, listeners and viewers used to be measured by such things as circulation numbers, gross impression or gross rating points.  Now they are measured by clicks or the new terminology – Pay Per Click (PPC).  The advertiser will pay a certain amount of money for every click on the Website or URL.
However, with any new measuring device, there are glitches.  One of the players in this business, Fayetteville (NC)-based TyBit Unified Search (www.tyBit.com) has uncovered a major glich in PPC and has created a new measuring and revenue-generating tool.  TyBit has discovered that 50 percent of the clicks are generated by 6 percent of the clickers.  TyBit CEO Clarence Briggs calls this market segment “natural born clickers.”  They are 25-44 years old and have incomes of less than $40,000.  While the age group might be attractive, the income numbers are not.

Don’t forget markets are people with needs, the money to spend and the willingness to spend it.  Under $40,000 a year doesn’t cut it.

So TyBit has a different approach, according to Briggs. “Our model is simple and affordable.  We give away PPC ads, but our preferred advertisers bid on a pay-per-position or PPP auction.  They bid on positions 1 through 10 and pay a flat, daily rate starting at only $1 a day for a key term regardless of the number of impressions or clicks,” he said adding, “In the first week, we have had over 400 advertisers sign up for PPP based on our Global Keyword Registration (GKR) system.”

Stay tuned to read about the latest in the PPC or PPP phenomenon.  Although these new ideas seem groundbreaking, I still say that Philadelphia merchandiser John Wanamaker said it best about 100 years ago – “Half my advertising is wasted, the question is which half.”