Page impressions don't mean ads are being read

We often read about how the Middle East is not adopting the online advertising model as fast as the rest of the world.

The region's marketers are labeled as old-thinking, old school marketers by those who criticise the region for not picking up the new medium. But who's blaming who? There should be no blame.

When it comes to technology, needs justify the implementation. It's either a technology push or a market pull.

What is observed in the Middle East is usually the technology push rather than the market pull. The market hasn't grown in terms of knowledge sharing while the sharks at agencies are trying to push what they want to sell with sales information and facts.

The real deal is the fact that the online advertising medium is nothing but another space, just like the print space or outdoor.

What's so special about it? Well, usually the tags 'accurate' and 'trackable' come after web advertising. You're going to hear terms like page impressions and number of clicks before they hit the ROI and metrics in your face. Okay, so there's data.

Take an advert that is published in a magazine. How often do we skip reading ads automatically and unknowingly? Research shows that the same thing happens with online ads.

You can't escape an ad on a printed magazine, but you can block online ads using browser plug-ins.

Upon buying a magazine all the ads are considered viewed, the same way every page-view on a portal assumes that all the ads were viewed and that the portal reader has actually scrolled down and seen them all.

What an assumption. Page impressions equals the number of times that an ad gets generated on a portal's page, it doesn't mean that the user has seen it.

I'm a huge supporter of online ads and I work on the medium as well, but I believe if a technology is to be implemented, it has to be implemented and marketed using the right data and facts, that's how a technology gets adopted. Who are we fooling?

Is there a new technology without shortcomings? Let's not fool ourselves and be true to the market that's the way a technology becomes needed and gets injected with a market-pull instead.

Saleh Esmaeli is the author of the dot1ne.com website

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