A recent article on TechCrunch, written by Eric Clemons: Why Advertising is Failing on the Internet prompted a heated debate on the subject both in the comments and other blogs. The author’s postulat is that participatory nature of the Internet, which presents users with multiple choices ultimately rejects advertising. While surfing the web, people don’t want advertising, don’t need advertising and don’t trust advertising. Good provicative post, which I recommend together with it’s some 500 comments.

Now I know that I earlier have written that I myself don’t believe in mass advertising on the Internet. However, I think this issue is far more complex to be answered by one sentence. For the first, we shouldn’t confuse the concepts of advertising and PR. While both are marketing tactics, they are not the same. Every effort to monetize the Internet, whether it is a website, search optimization, product placement, opt-ins, reviews, e-mail and mobile marketing –  I think it’s too thin to call it all advertising. One thing is to say that advertising on the Internet will fail, and dramatically different thing is to claim that all monetization of the Internet will fail.

But even if we limit advertising to ‘simple commercial messages’, as Clemons puts it – I think there is hope for advertising to survive. I agree with Clemons, when he says:” simple commercial messages, pushed through whatever medium, in order to reach a potential customer who is in the middle of doing something else, will fail”. But I think there is also an answer there.  Yes, mass advertising on the Internet will fail. But relevant and creative advertising for a targeted group of people, while they are in the middle of searching for a certain type of information somewhere in the middle of nowhere of the long tail – will it automatically fail too?

Maybe. But I think it’s worth trying. After all, what do you have to lose? The long tail is cheap.

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