The Ultimate Marketing Machine

The ultimate marketing machine

Jul 6th 2006 | SAN FRANCISCO

From The Economist print edition

Thanks to the power of the internet, advertising is becoming less wasteful and its value more measurable

IN TERMS of efficiency, if not size, the advertising industry is only now starting to grow out of its century-long infancy, which might be called “the Wanamaker era”. It was John Wanamaker, a devoutly Christian merchant from Philadelphia, who in the 1870s not only invented department stores and price tags (to eliminate haggling, since everybody should be equal before God and price), but also became the first modern advertiser when he bought space in newspapers to promote his stores. He went about it in a Christian way, neither advertising on Sundays nor fibbing (thus minting the concept of “truth in advertising”). And, with his precise business mind, he expounded a witticism that has ever since seemed like an economic law: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted,” he said. “The trouble is, I don't know which half.”

Wanamaker's wasted half is not entirely proverbial. The worldwide advertising industry is likely to be worth $428 billion in revenues this year, according to ZenithOptimedia, a market-research firm. Greg Stuart, the author of a forthcoming book on the industry and the boss of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade association, estimates that advertisers wasteвЂ"that is, they send messages that reach the wrong audience or none at allвЂ"$112 billion a year in America and $220 billion worldwide, or just over half of their total spending. Wanamaker was remarkably accurate.

What Wanamaker could not have foreseen, however, was the internet. A bevy of entrepreneurial firmsвЂ"from Google, the world's most valuable online advertising agency disguised as a web-search engine, to tiny Silicon Valley upstarts, many of them only months oldвЂ"are now selling advertisers new tools to reduce waste. These come in many exotic forms, but they have one thing in common: a desire to replace the old approach to advertising, in which advertisers pay for the privilege of “exposing” a theoretical audience to their message, with one in which advertisers pay only for real and measurable actions by consumers, such as clicking on a web link, sharing a video, placing a call, printing a coupon or buying something.

Rishad Tobaccowala, the “chief innovation officer” of Publicis, one of the world's biggest advertising groups, and boss of Denuo, a Chicago-based unit within Publicis with the job of probing the limits of new advertising models, likens traditional Wanamaker-era advertising to “an atom bomb dropped on a big city.” The best example is the 30-second spot on broadcast television. An independent firm (such as Nielsen, in America) estimates how many television sets are tuned to a given channel at a given time. Advertisers then pay a rate, called CPM (cost per thousand), for the right to expose the implied audience to their spot. If Nielsen estimates that, say, 1m people (“the city”) are watching a show, an advertiser paying a CPM of $20 would fork out $20,000 for his commercial (“the atom bomb”).

Gone for a brew

The problem is obvious. The television room may be empty. Its owners may have gone to the kitchen to make a cup of tea or to the toilet. They may have switched channels during the commercial break, be napping or talking on the telephone. The viewer may be a teenage girl, even though the advertisement promotes Viagra. It might even be a TiVo or other such device that records the show so that the owner can watch it later and skip through the commercials. Parks Associates, a consumer-technology consultancy, estimates that 10m American households already have a digital video recorder.

“Segmentation”, an advertising trend during the past two decades tied to fragmentation in the media, represents only a cosmetic change, thinks Mr Tobaccowala. Advertisers airing a spot on a niche channel on cable television, for example, might be able to make more educated guesses about the audience (in their 30s, gay and affluent, say), but they are still paying a CPM rate in order blindly to cast a message in a general direction. Instead of atom bombs on cities, says Mr Tobaccowala, segmentation is at best “dropping conventional bombs on villages”. The collateral damage is still considerable.

By contrast, the new advertising models based on internet technologies amount to innovation. Instead of bombs, says Mr Tobaccowala, advertisers now “make lots of spearheads and then get people to impale themselves.” The idea is based on consumers themselves taking the initiative by showing up voluntarily and interacting with what they find online.

In its simplest form, this involves querying a search engine with keywords (“used cars”, say), then scanning the search results as well as the sponsored links from advertisers, and then clicking on one such link. In effect, the consumer has expressed an intention twice (first with his query, then with his click). The average cost to an advertiser from one such combination is 50 cents, which corresponds to a CPM of $500; by contrast, the average CPM in traditional (“exposure”) media is $20. A consumer's action, in other words, is 25 times as valuable as his exposure.

The person who deserves more credit than anybody else for this insight is Bill Gross, an internet entrepreneur with a kinetic mind and frenetic speech who in 1996 started Idealab, a sort of factory for inventions. One of the companies to come out of his factory was GoTo.com, later renamed Overture, which pioneered the market for “paid search” or “pay-per-click” advertising. In 2001 Mr Gross ran into Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the young co-founders of Google, a search engine that was just then becoming popular, but still had no way of making money. He offered them a partnership or merger, but Messrs Brin and Page were purist at the time about not diluting the integrity of their search results with commercialism and they turned him down.

Within a year, however, Messrs Brin and Page changed their minds and came up with AdWords, a system based on Overture's idea of putting advertising links next to relevant search results and charging only for clicks (but with the added twist that advertisers