Why advertising is failing on the Internet

On TechCrunch today, Eric Clemons casts doubt on the viability of advertising to profit online. An interesting thesis to consider now that major daily papers have begun to fold and the move to web-only for traditional journalism has begun in earnest.

clipped from www.techcrunch.com My basic premise is that the internet is not replacing advertising but shattering it, and all the king’s horses, all the king’s men, and all the creative talent of Madison Avenue cannot put it together again. To analyze this statement we need a working definition of advertising, and I proposed the following, which is as general as I could make it: Advertising is using sponsored commercial messages to build a brand and paying to locate these messages where they will be observed by potential customers performing other activities; these messages describe a product or service, its price or fundamental attributes, where it can be found, its explicit advantages, or the implicit benefits from its use.