Mother Clickers

This little snippet from MediaWeek reminded me of debate that continues to happen.  Advertisers are still too click focused.  I just had this debate recently with an advertiser.  We debated how important optimizing your campaign for just straight click-thrus.  The majority of Internet users don’t click on ads. 
The MediaWeek has a great quote from a Tacoda exec:
"Close to 70 percent of the online universe doesn’t click at all," said Greg Rogers, VP of sales strategy at Tacoda.

Your brand still makes an impression on the consumer. I can’t believe that we’re 10+ years into the online advertising space with under 10% of the global media business spent on the Internet and we’re still having this debate.

Clearly the same bar of online effectiveness is not apparent in the offline space (hello, Nielsen boxes
anyone).  This quote from the dawn of online advertising has always rung true to me:

"Clickthrough is a poor measurement of banner ad effectiveness, especially for low involvement products. It is foolhardy to think of Web ads solely as a device to move visitors to the advertisers’ Web sites. For many products, the Web ad should be designed to communicate a selling message in a manner akin to print media."

    – Jef I. Richards (1997), advertising professor, The University of Texas at Austin.

There is no better way to target customers than online advertising.   Its only going to get better as technology better targets consumers.  Eventually brand advertisers will not be so short-sighted.