It's official: online advertisement does not work

Let's face it: Traditional advertisement does not work anymore. It worked decades ago, but we have changed (get a copy of Martin Lindstrom’s book “Buyology” for easy reading on this issue). Neural marketing studies show that we do not remember ads at all. We ignore product placements. We just don’t care.

My own observations confirm these findings. I think it is even worse: we in fact consciously don’t WANT to care. We actively want to ignore ads as soon as we smell them from far away. That is why Google will be getting in real trouble. Google has noticed the shift in our behavior and has been trying to refocus for some time already. However, Google has failed at all attempts to get into social networks and transform Google into social network advertisement company. The only exception is YouTube, but it is not really a social network.

People do not like Google ads, either. I use ad killer add-on in my Firefox browser, and every time I happen to use a different, unprotected browser and see the number of ads everywhere, I keep thinking how nice it is to live without all that ad crap.

Harvesting data to "improve" advertisement effectiveness is also just phony. The whole “targeting” idea means that–when appropriate data has been collected–right persons will be exposed to right ads. Wrong!

THERE ARE NO RIGHT PERSONS TO BE EXPOSED TO ONLINE ADS

That is, except some brainless individuals, of course. The moment I see a logo or anything that seems to be remotely associated with advertisement, I immediately deactivate my senses. My logic is simple: If someone advertises a product, than it means:

• the product will be expensive (advertisement is insanely expensive these days,
  - or/and -
  
• the product is likely to be lame.
  

While the former point is obvious, the later needs more explanation. Just listen to your guts: how do good products actually sell? Well, they sell best through word-of-mouth recommendations. If something is really good and worth buying, we will.

If one person likes a product, tomorrow two more will know and like it, the next day four more, etc. Assume, just for the sake of the argument, every new customer show the products to two new buyers who then head straight for the store and buy the product in question. We will even be quite conservative and assume that every customer only recommends that new product once in his/her lifetime. This generates the following series:

This generates the following chart:


After only 20 days, more than two million customers have bought the new product–without ANY advertisement expenses.

I am pretty sure that all modern successful products, like Apple’s devices or Blackberry in the past, did not spread by advertisement but were bought because of their superior usability and outstanding designs.

In short, good products do not actually need expensive marketing. It is correct to immediately doubt the product quality if you see an intense advertisement campaign on the TV or banners on the net.

If I had Google stock, I would sell now.