Online Marketing: A User's Manual

Chapter 10

Digital Advertising

INTRODUCTION

Some people say that advertising is the second oldest profession in the world. While that may be up for debate, it’s true that advertising must have begun around the time that one person had the same product or service as someone else – and wanted to get the word out that what they were offering was better. In this time of the evolving Internet, though, advertising is changing at a rapid pace.

The basics are still the same: you want to bring your product or service to the attention of customers. You still make a plan based on your goals, identify target markets, create relevant messaging, place ads where your customers are, and then implement your ads as part of a larger media plan. What is different is the options for where you put those ads, what you can do to help them be successful, and how you determine their effectiveness.

The key things you’ll need to think about for any ad campaign are contextualization, relevancy, consumer acceptance, and how all of these different options fit in with your campaign goals. Why? One of the big things that has changed about advertising is how much control people have over what they see. People determine what kind of advertising they view in the online space – whether that is through the search terms they are looking for, their profile information on a social network or their choice of which websites ...