March 25

Eric Clemons thinks advertising is dead

Eric Clemons, thinks advertising is dead.

To be more clear, he thinks online advertising is dead. And he’s a pretty smart guy. As Professor of Operations and Information Management at the Wharton Business School, you can safely assume he’s an expert on a matter. Bearded, bow tie-wearing men are always smarter than you.

He argues that advertising on the internet is dieing. And the scary thing is that I’m not sure I’m in a position to disagree with him (other than the fact that he had a PhD from Cornell and I have not a PhD from not Cornell).

He argues that online advertising will fail for three reasons: consumers don’t trust advertising (agreed), consumers don’t want to view advertising (agreed) and consumers do not need advertising (agreed).

The only issue with the above statement is that people still click on ads and people still buy stuff because of them. The great thing about online ads is that you can track where the person goes and what they see and if the person doesn’t click on it and doesn’t buy something because of it, the people who made the ad probably won’t buy space for it again. If it continues to work, people will continue to create ads.

Until that trend dies, online advertising will continue to survive.

Sources: Eric Clemons via TechCrunch