I got some very interesting comments on my post last week on the marketing confidence gap. Commenter Bryce places the blame on agencies for always pushing traditional advertising over other pieces of the “360 degree brand stewardship” pie, and flogging brand-building through traditional media over other disciplines like retail, PR, and online — their respective cost effectiveness be damned. “In my years in the ad business I never saw an honest proposal that divided a campaign into realistic disruption points. For both the creative and media agencies, there’s simply too much to lose,” he writes. Commenter Paul sees the problem originating–here I’m extrapolating on what I assume he meant — with an imposition of a traditional ad model that’s suited to passive medium like TV onto a different beast, where consumers are actively looking for product information.

Sam Flemming’s comment points out that there’s an underlying assumption — both in my post and in some of the comments that followed — conflating Internet advertising with display advertising. Touche, Sam. On re-reading I see that I’m guilty as charged, at least in the way I wrote that blog post. I should have been more explicit: I really was talking about awareness, brand-building, all that stuff that’s traditionally been the forte of creative agencies, and if it read as though I only had “banner ads” in mind, that’s my fault. I’m not, however, willing to cede awareness and brand-building to traditional advertising on traditional media. There’s ample evidence to suggest that the Internet can be an effective medium to drive awareness. In fact, a colleague of mine here in Beijing headed up a very thorough study on this, the findings of which I may be able to share here.

But this doesn’t make Sam’s comments any less pertinent. I excerpt from them here:

The opportunity for digital marketing is not necessarily limited to awareness. The real opportunity is that it provides a unique platform for brands to connect with consumers and participate in their world in meaningful ways… The real opportunity is for brands to be a part of the millions of conversations happening online. This doesn’t actually have to mean a bigger budget, but it does mean a different mindset, which as Bryce suggests, may be the biggest challenge of all.

Interestingly, there’s an article that Knowledge@Wharton just ran that talks about the “marketing confidence gap” in the U.S. context.

Americans spend an average of 14 hours a week online and 14 hours watching TV. But marketers spend 22% of their advertising dollars on TV and only 6% online, according to data compiled and analyzed by Google. Why are some chief marketing officers and major advertisers reluctant to add digital technology to the marketing mix, despite the Internet’s ability to help target huge audiences and build brand awareness?

In his comment to my earlier post, Paul suggests that paid search — and commenter Trevelyan adds contextually-relevant text ads — are a more effective way to advertise online. Depends who you are, and what your goals are. Patti Williams, a Wharton marketing professor quoted in the Knowledge@Wharton, suggests why big brands haven’t embraced search advertising.

Williams says that while the Internet provides advertisers with the ability to closely track consumer response to ads by measuring clicks or other online behavior, their reluctance to embrace the Internet may be due to uncertainty about how well it can shape broader brand messages.

“It’s not clear how Crest should leverage search advertising,” says Williams. “How many people are going online to search for toothpaste? It’s not [obvious that] a little ad on the screen is going to attract them. For the biggest bulk of media spending, online is just hard to figure out. The Internet is not that good at big brand building objectives, so there are a lot of companies struggling with a way to take advantage of the tremendous opportunity Google and other searches offer.”

As the article suggests, the mad proliferation of media channels makes the whole process of media buying ever so much more complicated. This is true whether you’re talking about the U.S., where once upon a time your choices were ABC, CBS, and NBC, or China, where not so long ago it was basically CCTV and a few major municipal networks. Add to this the sheer difficulty of planning and buying with online media, and one can easily understand why spend on the Internet lags consumer time spent online.

Anyway, thanks much for the very stimulating comments!