Grapevine Consulting

With this Friday the traditional date for women to ask men to get engaged I took a look at the recent ‘pay-for-engagement’ models, announced by Microsoft and VideoEgg, where advertisers pay based on reader response to an ad (tenuous I know, but just go with it).

While it’s good to see developing technology which continues to delve into consumer behaviour online and prove the value of online advertising (e.g. see an ad for a travel agent, book a holiday with that travel agent a week later) I still feel introducing this model isn’t dealing with a major issue when it comes to online advertising – why is online advertising not as valuable as traditional advertising?

I may be over-simplifying the situation but I still can’t fathom why an advertiser is happy to pay for brand exposure via a billboard consumers walk past but not necessarily a website where it will be virtually “walked past”.

Online advertising campaigns already have quite stringent metrics relating to response e.g. watching a video, click through to the site, register etc. But it also has some other tricks over the billboard. For example the ability to do demographic targeting means that the advertiser is only paying for the ad to be seen by their ideal audience. Billboards tend to cost a lot of money due to the volume of people who will see them but how many of them are likely to be target consumers for the advertiser?

The Microsoft advertising model will show advertisers a great deal of value in their ad spend – so could we expect that this advertising would then be charged at a premium rate if the model proves itself?

Any thoughts on why online advertising won’t be taken seriously very welcome here.