Take Your Places and . . . Action!
Rapidly, almost insidiously, the World Wide Web has engulfed nearly every aspect of our lives. Before most of us even learned the phrase “universal resource locator,” the suffix “.com” had replaced “Co.” and “Inc.” in our corporate nomenclature.
A browser, once just one of those pesky shoppers who wasn’t ready to buy, suddenly became an indispensable portal into our brave, new world. While marketers were still pondering how best to deal with mass media proliferating into 200 cable channels, the Internet landed on their front lawns like an alien spaceship full of big-brained colonizers warning that things would never be the same.
It’s the unknown, and so it is scary. But interspersed in the Internet’s birth cries is one clear and resounding call: This is an action-based medium. This is not TV, where the viewer is led through plot changes or news developments – and into commercials – by a program director. It’s not radio, where deejays pick the music or the topic and segue into ad spots not likely to be changed by a listener with her hands on the wheel and her eyes on the road.
On the Internet, the content choices are nearly infinite, and the viewer-clicker-listener (the consumer, to you) is in control. When it comes to demanding directors, Alfred Hitchcock had nothing on the average Net surfer.
That’s why, last year, Procter & Gamble called a summit conference of leading advertisers and media people to find out what the heck was the deal with these banner ads, whose one-percent clickthrough rate made the FSI coupon’s two-percent redemption look like the saving grace of the marketing world.
What every successful Web marketer knows, but what your ad agency won’t tell you, is that the Internet is a promotional medium. The Internet presents people with free information, easy communication, and cheap entertainment, so cyber-consumers have come to expect a lot. Seated anonymously in front of her computer console, the placid, cookie-baking mom becomes a ruthless, cold-and-calculating taskmaster. There’s a better deal a few clicks away, she sniffs, so tell me what’s in it for me and tell me fast.
She needs to be, in that most trite of promotional phrases, called to action. If she is to click on that banner ad, it had better be promising her a chance at a European vacation or a T-shirt or a free sample, or that particular brand message is just not in her field of vision.
The Internet has been called the most powerful transactional medium mankind has ever known. Notice that word “action” planted there in the middle of “transactional?” Call consumers to it. There are plenty of promotional tactics available on the Web to help you, as you’ll find in the pages that follow.
Go on, get on the spaceship.
