If you have been online long enough you remember banner advertisements. If you haven’t, please allow me to explain.

Banner advertisements were a horrible ad that usually sat at the top of a web page. They were annoying, nobody wanted to see them, and even though they were displayed trillions of times they never resulted in a single sale. Ok, I made that last part up. This is an example of what they used to look like, courtesy of valleyofthegeeks.com:

banner-example

It seems that the replacement for these is paid ads on social media. My “normal” friends have asked me multiple times “Why is this stupid junk in my stream?” I was on Twitter the other day, scrolling through my stream and I saw a toothpaste ad. Really? Paid ads on social media are annoying, nobody wants to see them, and even though they are displayed trillions of times… You get the idea… They suck. I have worked with a wide variety of companies and I have yet to have a single business owner tell me “Hey Len, our paid ads on social media are so cost effective!” It just isn’t going to happen.

Why is this stupid junk in my stream?

So to answer this question I have to assume that there are businesses out there that have yet to learn the hard way. I myself attempted several ads throughout early 2014. Just to get the experience under my belt I personally spent thousands of dollars running advertisements for various companies. I used cool images, tried to start conversations, tried to get people to like pages, tried to sell products, and tried to get traffic over to a website. Do you know what happened? Nothing. Actually, it worse worse than nothing. Fake accounts liked the pages and the web traffic usually stayed for under 1 second. People using fake accounts were clicking on all of the ads. Even ads targeted towards attorneys in Miami, FL ages 40-60 were clicked on by 12yr old kids in Chicago, IL. Maybe there is a brand that can benefit from it or has the money to throw away, but I sure haven’t met them yet. The ads are in the stream simply because businesses are still paying for them. I hope that one day they will go the way of the banner ad.

Len
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On January 7, 2015   /   Social Media   /   Leave a comment

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