Digital Marketing Is Like Baseball; Mostly The Catching Part

I love digital marketing. I’ve been a digital marketer for 25 years, since 1995. But I hate what’s going on in digital marketing today. Advertisers are wasting billions of dollars doing digital marketing incorrectly. I’ve written about this elsewhere [1, 2] so I won’t belabor the point here. This article will focus on what marketers can do to make it better — i.e. how to do digital marketing, leveraging its unique advantages and making it complementary to other marketing channels like “offline” — TV, print, and radio. 

Current State – 2020

It’s 2020, and digital ad spending in the U.S. is approaching $150 billion, and $350 billion worldwide annually. The vast majority of the ads (nearly 90%) are now purchased through programmatic channels, where algorithms bid, buy, and place ads in a matter of milliseconds.

The latest estimates put the number of ad impressions at 40 trillion impressions per month, or roughly half-a-quadrillion ads per year. (There are only 7 billion total humans on earth.) These gargantuan numbers are the result of big advertisers using digital with a reach and frequency mentality, carried over from TV advertising, and media-agency-think.

They think that showing more ads to more people more often, will increase sales. This worked in TV advertising decades ago, but doesn’t work in digital for a number of simple reasons: 1) there are no constraints on supply, because virtually infinite numbers of long tail sites can be created to generate virtually infinite numbers of ads, 2) there aren’t enough humans spending enough time online, and going to enormous numbers of long tail sites to see those ads, and  3) a good portion of actual humans block or ignore the ads anyway. That’s why more ads to more users (many are bots) more often doesn’t drive more business. 

Read more: forbes