HEAD BLOG

With the news of Twitter’s changing terms and conditions and the recent privacy related payout from Facebook, questions regarding the effectiveness of online advertising have been raised at the Head First water cooler. That and what madness Jordan will reveal next.

To take the slightly more reputable business of advertising for a moment, Twitter’s change of terms can easily be understood. Theirs is a service without a business model and, given its unimagined success, they are keen to capitalise. And who would blame them?Apart from the stalwart blowhards who see Twitter as their human right. Yet Twitter’s new terms seems to say if it’s a craze then it needs to make money. If it needs to make money, advertising placements are the way to go. Or so it seems. Creating a business model is about more than reverting to paid for advertising. Or it ought to be.

A business model is being bolted on and it’s almost painful to watch. Inserting ads into the Twitter stream will be received as spam and resisted by any who can. Services will rise up promising to filter the stream and it’s possible that Twitter’s efforts will be undermined.

Naturally, Twitter has its share of talented programmers and so the struggle might not be quite as straightforward as this. But it does lead to the question of how effective a Twitad will be.

As much as almost every sane person despises spam, the reality is that volume advertising does work. Inefficient? Of course. Effective? Certainly. Getting a % return in the low 0.somethings is still effective when you are discussing ad placements in the hundreds of millions.

Twitter users are different though. By and large they are most likely early adopters and susceptible to an entirely different mode if advertising. Even if Twitter and any subsequent advertisers have considered this it will be a struggle with more hope than strategy involved. In other words, no different to any other form of online advertising. Recent research into the degree of fakery involved in statistical reporting ought not to come as a surprise. It’s in the interests of the industry to inflate claims of effectiveness.

Yet as targetting becomes more refined (and we look to the recent Facebook settlement for just how refined this will become) this effectiveness will only grow. For now it looks like print and TV are “trusted” forms of advertising, delivering more in the way of measurable targets than newer forms.

But as Twitter has indicated, new forms aren’t going to stop appearing anytime soon. As new services capture our time, as advertisers look to build trust into the system and capitalise on the Stephen Fry effect, we must all, all who make their livelihoods by selling product, consider which forms of advertising are actually effective. Because, along with the underneaths of Frank Bruno’s boots, just because you can place ads somewhere doesn’t mean you should.