We all like to think that the crazy Wild West days of interactive experimentation are over, but the exact opposite is true: There are more harebrained, half-baked content schemes on the web than ever, and at least 90% of them will fail.
Marketing News & Strategy
Ditch the Lunatic Web Content Crazes
Beyond the Hype: The 10 Most Asinine Trends Online and Why You Should Ignore Them

Mark Simon is VP-industry relations for New York search-engine-marketing firm Didit. He also works closely with industry organizations such as the IAB, Shop.org and the DMA. He joined the company in 2004 as director of sales.
This is exactly as it should be: Interactive media is inherently Darwinian; barriers to entry are low or nonexistent and nobody's figured out what really works. So CMOs are faced with a double-edged sword: If they refuse to experiment and just hunker down with time-proven media, their interactive efforts will simply muddle along. But if they place too many bad bets, they'll be on a fast track to a pink slip.
Sorting out the I-rational from the I-ridiculous is a full-time job. But here are 10 content crazes that have enough lunacy in them to warrant serious CMO scrutiny:
1. ANYTHING HAVING ANYTHING TO DO WITH VIRTUAL
REALITY.
It's no secret that marketers are having many second thoughts about
Second Life, which just a few months ago was the preferred virtual
vehicle for many major brands to show their wares. Today, walking
(or flying) through these branded areas is more chilling and
depressing than walking through an abandoned amusement park. Do you
really think IBM's brand is being helped by hosting a 3-D area that
has tumbleweeds rolling through it?
2. ANYTHING HAVING ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE PHONY-RECOMMENDATION
INDUSTRY.
Do marketers seriously believe consumers are going to be gullible
enough to believe product recommendations from people who are being
paid to recommend the products? Of course not. And yet a sneaky,
stealthy form of word-of-mouth advertising called "pay per post" is
based on exactly this proposition. CMOs who dabble in pay per post
or its deranged cousin, "astroturfing" (phony grass-roots marketing
using blogs) are playing with fire and shouldn't be surprised when
the brands they're supposed to be shepherding get toasted once the
ruse is inevitably discovered.
3. "SMART ADS" THAT AREN'T SO SMART.
Ad units capable of displaying customized creative keyed to
historical search behavior are a great idea in theory, but there
are enough serious problems with this kind of advertising to give
any CMO pause. Many users share computers, which means that Spouse
A is going to be targeted with ads based on Spouse B's search
behavior. What could be more irrelevant?
4. "SEARCHLESS" ADVERTISING.
Many CMOs have no problem authorizing multimillion-dollar TV and
print campaigns, but their systematic neglect of search marketing
borders on the criminally myopic. Search-engine marketing doesn't
drive demand; it responds to it, which means that unless your brand
is present to capture post-ad queries, you've failed to close the
marketing loop. Plus, it's quite likely your competitors are
already exploiting that failure with strategies to poach the
awareness you've spent so much to generate.
5. AUDIO-RELIANT VIDEO PRE-ROLL SPOTS.
One of the main reasons why repurposing standard 30-second TV spots
into video pre-roll ads is so ridiculous is that most users turn
down or mute the sound to save their fellow workers exposure to the
audio. True, most users will endure a (silent) pre-roll to catch a
news clip, but unless your ad can stand on its visual elements
alone, you're wasting your money.
6. "HUMAN-POWERED" SEARCH ENGINES.
The reason search engines are much better places to find
information than directories is because they leverage automation to
do the grunt work that human editors used to do. Directories
(especially vertical ones) are still useful, but the whole concept
of "human-powered" search engines is so ill-conceived that it's a
miracle venture capitalists, advertisers, the tech press and even
some CMOs take it seriously.
7. KNEE-JERK ALGORITHMIC MEDIA BUYING.
OK, Google runs a terrific search engine that's become an
advertising powerhouse. But just because Google delivers results
for search and contextually based media doesn't mean that it has an
advantage in print and broadcast media, which are inherently less
trackable. So far, Google's forays into non-search media have been
failures, but it shows no sign of giving up. Some call this
persistence, but the image that comes to my mind is Don Quixote
attacking that famous windmill.
8. BEHAVIORAL TARGETING THAT GOES TOO FAR.
Right now, only 30% of users regularly delete their cookies, but
that percentage could soar if a widely publicized goof up (such as
last summer's leak of AOL search data, which was detailed enough to
identify individual users) starts the regulatory wheels turning in
Washington. CMOs need to be cognizant of the dangers of behavioral
targeting before committing their brands to what some will
certainly view as excessive cyber-sneakiness.
9. TWITTER AND ITS MICROBLOGGING ILK.
What could be more annoying and less useful than a site where
thousands of people are given 140 characters to shout out about
what they're doing at every moment of the day? The amazing thing is
that enough people out there think this mindless stream of ephemera
("I'm eating a tangerine," "I'm waiting for a plane," "I want a Big
Mac") is interesting enough to serve as the basis for a viable
advertising platform.
10. INTRUSIVE MOBILE MARKETING.
The mobile-marketing environment is qualitatively unlike
interactive media, in which the user's basic situation (watching
TV, surfing the web) can be presumed with some accuracy. Users of
mobile devices are doing all kinds of things with their devices,
some fanciful and some drop-dead serious. For that reason, they
will never take kindly to advertising that interposes itself
between them and a critical task.