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I’m a little late in posting about Seth Godin’s recent article on clicking ads to thank bloggers for great content. At C&D we’re huge fans of almost everything Seth has to say about marketing, business and treating your audience with respect, but like many others I completely disagree with the notion that ads should be treated like a tip jar.

Several bloggers have observed that encouraging people to click ads is generally against the terms of service of whichever ad network you’re using, but that’s a little beside the point. For me the bigger issue is that advertising hasn’t changed nearly as much as many online marketers would like to think.

How Google Adsense (almost) changed everything

When Google first launched their Adsense program for publishers, it appeared both to be the ultimate democratization of advertising, and the very best way for advertisers to ensure that they could actually measure the impact of their expenditures. Rather than buy display ads (such as banners) on a cost per-impression basis, Adsense for publishers used the same model as Adsense for search — i.e. advertisers only paid when their ads were clicked. The result? If a million people saw your ad but no-one clicked, you paid nothing, so in theory you paid only for genuine interest in your product or service. Makes perfect sense, right?

We use Google Adsense here on the C&D site, and generally I’m a big supporter of the program. But it’s only part of the picture. Ultimately advertisers are buying access to an audience whom they believe are a fit with their brand, and for a great many products and services that fit simply can’t be determined by a click.

Why brands still matter

When I bought my now-gone-but-not-forgotten MINI Cooper S, I’d lusted after the car in response to so many different and largely unmeasurable forms of media. That media included billboard ads, TV and magazines, but it also included countless visits to online forums and the MINI website, to agonize over intricate details of specification and color combinations. It was persistent exposure to a brand, and creative presentation of that brand in a way that really made me want it that mattered, but throughout that process I don’t think I gave one trackable, transactional indication of my interest in the car.

Generally most of the things we buy, most brands and products we love, have very little to do with the ads we do or don’t click. We’ll be introducing brand advertising on the C&D site in the next few months, focusing on sponsors who create products and services that correspond to our own values and beliefs and, we hope, those of our readers. I genuinely believe it can be a symbiotic relationship: we create content that you want, which in turn is supported by advertisers who complement and want to be associated with our content. Our success is infinitely more likely to be measured by the extent to which we get that balance right than it is by how many of you choose to click or not to click.

Photo courtesy of The Car Spy.