Superclick Theory
SuperClick Theory: The advertising vehicle that connects all the powers of the online advertising universe
By John Brock
I was watching Ted Koppel and his 3 hour show on “Price of Security” yesterday and night. During the discussions the panel talked a lot about the apparent extreme existential anxiety that has been instilled in the American public pertaining to the potential threats of Saddam Hussein at the time and current Al Qaeda and other Islamic Terrorist organizations. The panel and audience talked about privacy issues concerning the casting of the huge electronic surveillance net by the NSA and CIA in hopes to catch the small percentage of thugs that would want to do us harm and if that impedes on American civil liberties.
I am not in the business of educating others on that topic so I won’t go there. I’ll save that for a possible future blog.
What I do see is a similar phenomenon that has taken place in online advertising industry. There is an existential anxiety that pushes advertisers to feel that they must advertise in bulk in order to catch the small percentage of buyers that they receive. For the most part, this is not true. And soon it should not be true at all.
What has fostered the anxiety? A number of factors have. First keyword addiction has helped to lay a foundation for “more is better”. Secondly the ease of setting up a basic CPM based ad model on a website has pushed every Tom, Dick and Harry to sell their web space via CPM. Thirdly the extreme success of Google’s AdSense product has resulted in millions of web pages saying “Ads by Google”, again helping to instill the notion that advertising all over the place is better. Yeah, supposedly Google’s results are based on the content of the webpage, but we all know how often that the ads are irrelevant to the content, but I digress.
We need to kill the broad net approach and remove the anxiety.
Utilizing a combination of advertising vehicles in concert would allow the advertiser to focus online ad spend (not reduce the total amount spent) but to intensely focus it, making it more effective with a larger return on investment. Combing keywords with BT (behavioral targeting), Local Search and CPA (cost per acquisition) would connect the dots and set the stage for a Superclick model that would render each technology useless in-of-itself.
Imagine if you will; submitting keywords that relate to your products and services, having those keywords hit on and your ad displayed based upon behavioral factors of the searcher, adding local search features such as maps / calling and only paying when that searcher has converted for you? Sound good? Well it would be except that it doesn’t exist yet; at least not in one smooth, easy to use, comprehensive service. Perhaps it is because service providers have been pocketing such enormous amounts of revenue off of the bulk philosophy, they just haven’t seen the need? You’ll have to ask them.
This type of comprehensive model may slow down revenue injection into 99% of current providers, but it would certainly explode the revenue of a new entrant that offers it in a working, reliable format. There is one and only one current provider that has the opportunity to combine all of the components needed to complete the equation. The company is Google. It has each technology at its disposal. I believe that Google is already working on this, which is the reason for its recent slew of offerings. If Google does succeed at combining all the models, I guess it would only seem fitting that a company born out of an educational institution would successfully formulate the Superclick Theory.