神马文学网最后的营销机器
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翻译 最后的营销机器（营销终结者）
Special Report From The Economist Translate by skyun
Thanks to the power of the internet, advertising is becoming less wasteful and its value more measurable
由于互联网的力量，广告投放变地不那么浪费，而它的价值的可测量性正在提高。
IN TERMS of efficiency, if not size, the advertising industry is only now starting to grow out of its century-long infancy, which might be called “the Wanamaker era”. It was John Wanamaker, a devoutly Christian merchant from Philadelphia, who in the 1870s not only invented department stores and price tags (to eliminate haggling, since everybody should be equal before God and price), but also became the first modern advertiser when he bought space in newspapers to promote his stores. He went about it in a Christian way, neither advertising on Sundays nor fibbing (thus minting the concept of “truth in advertising”). And, with his precise business mind, he expounded a witticism that has ever since seemed like an economic law: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted,” he said. “The trouble is, I don‘t know which half.”
如果从效率不是规模的角度来说，广告产业才刚刚开始走出它一个世纪长的幼年期，也可以说是它的“沃纳梅克时代”。 沃纳梅克是来自费城的一位虔诚的基督教商人，在19世纪70年代，他不仅发明了百货商店和价格标签（从此消除了争价，使得在上帝和价格面前人人平等），而且当他通过购买报纸的版面空间来促进商品销售的时候，成为了第一个现代广告人。他用基督教的方式从事这种活动，即不在星期天做广告也不对客户撒慌。（因此创造了“无欺诈广告”的概念）。有着精确的商业思维的他，用一句直到今天看起来像一个经济法则的俏皮话解释了广告这个东西。“我花在广告上的钱有一半是浪费了，”他说，“可问题是，我不知道是哪一半。”
Wanamaker‘s wasted half is not entirely proverbial. The worldwide advertising industry is likely to be worth $428 billion in revenues this year, according to ZenithOptimedia, a market-research firm. Greg Stuart, the author of a forthcoming book on the industry and the boss of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade association, estimates that advertisers waste—that is, they send messages that reach the wrong audience or none at all—$112 billion a year in America and $220 billion worldwide, or just over half of their total spending. Wanamaker was remarkably accurate.
沃纳梅克的“一半浪费论”并不完全只是一个谚语。根据一家叫“实力传播”的市场调查公司的统计结果：全世界广告业今年的总收入大概是在4280亿美元左右。Greg Stuart，一本即将出版的关于广告行业的书籍的作者，也是一家叫“交互广告局”的同业协会的老板。他估计广告客户的浪费――即他们把广告信息发送给错误的受众或者根本就没有到达受众的部分――美国一年是1120亿美元而世界范围内是2200亿美元，正好接近他们广告总量的一半。沃纳梅克的说法非常准确。
What Wanamaker could not have foreseen, however, was the internet. A bevy of entrepreneurial firms—from Google, the world‘s most valuable online advertising agency disguised as a web-search engine, to tiny Silicon Valley upstarts, many of them only months old—are now selling advertisers new tools to reduce waste. These come in many exotic forms, but they have one thing in common: a desire to replace the old approach to advertising, in which advertisers pay for the privilege of “exposing” a theoretical audience to their message, with one in which advertisers pay only for real and measurable actions by consumers, such as clicking on a web link, sharing a video, placing a call, printing a coupon or buying something.
沃纳梅克当初没有预测到的是互联网的出现。一群创业公司的出现――从谷歌，一家这个世界上最有价值的伪装成网络搜索引擎的在线广告代理公司，到那些很小的甚至只有几个月大小的硅谷暴发户。他们都忙着向他们的广告主销售新型的营销工具以减少浪费。尽管他们以不同的方式，但是，有一点相同的是：他们希望采用一种新的广告模式，在这种模式下，
广告客户只需为那些真正的和可测量的广告受众行为付费。（比如点击一个网页链接，共享了一个视频，打出了一个电话，印刷了一张赠券或者购买了某些产品）。来取代原有的广告模式，即广告客户为他们的广告信息在理论上能够“暴光到”的客户付费。
Rishad Tobaccowala, the “chief innovation officer” of Publicis, one of the world‘s biggest advertising groups, and boss of Denuo, a Chicago-based unit within Publicis with the job of probing the limits of new advertising models, likens traditional Wanamaker-era advertising to “an atom bomb dropped on a big city.” The best example is the 30-second spot on broadcast television. An independent firm (such as Nielsen, in America) estimates how many television sets are tuned to a given channel at a given time. Advertisers then pay a rate, called CPM (cost per thousand), for the right to expose the implied audience to their spot. If Nielsen estimates that, say, 1m people (“the city”) are watching a show, an advertiser paying a CPM of $20 would fork out $20,000 for his commercial (“the atom bomb”).
Rishad Tobaccowala,世界上最大的一个广告集团－阳狮的“首席创新官”，也是阳狮旗下一家设在芝加哥的以探查新广告模式的缺陷为目标的公司的老板。他把沃纳梅克时代的广告比作“一颗原子弹扔在一座大城市。”最好的例子就是广播电视上30秒广告。会有一家独立的公司（像美国的尼尔森）估算有多少台电视机在某一个时段收看某个频道。然后，广告主为一个比率付费，这个比率叫每千人成本。因此来取得向暗涵的潜在客户暴光广告内容的权利。如果尼尔森评估说，这个城市中有100万人在收看某个电视节目，则一个广告主以20美元的千人成本计算的话，他总共需要为他的广告（原子弹）支付2万美元。
Gone for a brew
The problem is obvious. The television room may be empty. Its owners may have gone to the kitchen to make a cup of tea or to the toilet. They may have switched channels during the commercial break, be napping or talking on the telephone. The viewer may be a teenage girl, even though the advertisement promotes Viagra. It might even be a TiVo or other such device that records the show so that the owner can watch it later and skip through the commercials. Parks Associates, a consumer-technology consultancy, estimates that 10m American households already have a digital video recorder.
这种模式的缺陷是非常明显的。放电视的房间也许是空的。它的主人可能去厨房泡一杯茶或者是上厕所去了。在广告出现的时候他们可能已经转换频道，或者在织毛衣，打电话什么的。
甚至一个关于伟哥促销的广告，受众却可能是个十几岁的小女孩。受众也可能通过TiVo这样的录像设备把节目录制下来而跳过那些商业广告。Parks Associates，一个消费者技术咨询服务公司，估算每千万个美国家庭中，已经有一台数码影音录像设备。
“Segmentation”, an advertising trend during the past two decades tied to fragmentation in the media, represents only a cosmetic change, thinks Mr Tobaccowala. Advertisers airing a spot on a niche channel on cable television, for example, might be able to make more educated guesses about the audience (in their 30s, gay and affluent, say), but they are still paying a CPM rate in order blindly to cast a message in a general direction. Instead of atom bombs on cities, says Mr Tobaccowala, segmentation is at best “dropping conventional bombs on villages”. The collateral damage is still considerable.
Tobaccowala先生认为：依靠媒介细分而进行的“市场细分”，作为过去二十年来广告发展的一个趋势，仅仅表现出一些表面上的变化。广告主在一个有线电视的利基频道投放广告，例如，也许能够对受众作出更有依据的推测（30岁上下，富有的，同性恋者），但是他们仍然为了在一个大致的方向盲目地投放他们的广告信息而支付一个CPM（每千人成本比率）。Tobaccowala说，虽然不同于原子弹在城里爆炸，所谓的细分也只不过是把原来的扔在了村子里而已。间接的损失仍然相当大。
By contrast, the new advertising models based on internet technologies amount to innovation. Instead of bombs, says Mr Tobaccowala, advertisers now “make lots of spearheads and then get people to impale themselves.” The idea is based on consumers themselves taking the initiative by showing up voluntarily and interacting with what they find online.
相反地，建立在网络技术也就是创新基础上的新型广告模式取代了原先的，Tobaccowala说，现在广告主“制造了大量的先头部队然后让人们自己陷入其中。”这种想法是建立在消费者自己带头自愿地暴露并与他们在网上找到的产品信息产生互动。
In its simplest form, this involves querying a search engine with keywords (“used cars”, say), then scanning the search results as well as the sponsored links from advertisers, and then clicking on one such link. In effect, the consumer has expressed an intention twice (first with his query, then with his click). The average cost to an advertiser from one such combination is 50 cents, which corresponds to a CPM of $500; by contrast, the average CPM in traditional (“exposure”) media is $20. A consumer‘s action, in other words, is 25 times as valuable as his exposure.
在这种简单的模式中，包括了用户用关键字询问某个搜索引擎（“二手车”比如），然后扫描搜索的结果和广告主赞助的链接。实际上，消费者已经在这个过程中两下次表达了他的意图（第一次是他的询问，然后是他的点击）。一个广告主从这样一次结合中的平均成本是50美分，相应的CPM（每千人成本）是500美元；相比之下，传统（暴露）媒体的每千人成本20美元。换句话说，导致消费者的行动的价值，是仅仅的广告信息暴露的25倍。
The person who deserves more credit than anybody else for this insight is Bill Gross, an internet entrepreneur with a kinetic mind and frenetic speech who in 1996 started Idealab, a sort of factory for inventions. One of the companies to come out of his factory was GoTo.com, later renamed Overture, which pioneered the market for “paid search” or “pay-per-click” advertising. In 2001 Mr Gross ran into Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the young co-founders of Google, a search engine that was just then becoming popular, but still had no way of making money. He offered them a partnership or merger, but Messrs Brin and Page were purist at the time about not diluting the integrity of their search results with commercialism and they turned him down.
比任何人都更应该接受这项荣誉的是Bill Gross，一个有着活跃的思维和疯狂的言论的互联网企业家，他在1996年开创了一种专门提供创新产品的工厂－Idealab。从这个工厂中产生出一个叫“GoTo.com”的公司，稍后改名叫“Overture”，这个公司牵引广告市场走向“搜索付费”或“点击收费”。2001年的时候，Gross先生照会Sergey Brin 和Larry Page。一家叫“Google”的搜索引擎公司的两个年轻的合伙创办人，他们的公司就在这个时候变地很受欢迎，但始终没有找到公司的盈利模式。Gross提出和他们的公司合股或者合并的要约。但Sergey Brin 和Larry Page在那个时候持纯化论的立场，他们不愿意看到搜索结果的诚实性被商业主义所稀释，所以最终拒绝了Gross的请求。
Within a year, however, Messrs Brin and Page changed their minds and came up with AdWords, a system based on Overture‘s idea of putting advertising links next to relevant search results and charging only for clicks (but with the added twist that advertisers could bid for keywords in an online auction). Google soon added AdSense, a system that goes beyond search-results pages and places “sponsored” (ie, advertising) links on the web pages of newspapers and other publishers that sign up to be part of Google‘s network. Like AdWords, these AdSense advertisements are “contextual”—relevant to the web page‘s content—and the advertiser pays for them only when a web surfer clicks. Together, AdWords and AdSense produced $6.1 billion in revenues for Google last year.
然而，不到一年，Messrs Brin 和Page改变了他们的想法并且想到了AdWords（关键字广告计划），这是一个建立在Overture的想法基础上的广告系统――他们把广告放在相关搜索结果旁边，然后只按该广告的点击量收费。（但一个附加的条件是广告主必须在一次网络拍卖中为相应的关键字竞标）。Google很快又推出了AdSense计划，这个系统则建立在搜索结果的网页之外，“赞助”的广告链接放置在那些与Google签订了协议成为其AdSense网络系统
的一部分的报纸和其他出版物的网页上。和AdWords一样，这些AdSense也是“情景化的”
—跟相应网页的内容有关—只有当广告被网上冲浪者点击的时候，广告主才需要付费。总的加起来，过去的一年里，AdWords和AdSense为Google带来了61亿美元的收入。
Because this advertising model is so lucrative, all internet portals want to catch up with Google. In 2003 Yahoo!, the largest media property on the web, bought Overture from Mr Gross for $1.6 billion. Yahoo! then dropped the technology it had been licensing from Google. Then Microsoft, which owns MSN, another large internet portal, built adCenter, its version of a “monetisation engine”, which has now replaced Yahoo! as the advertising system for searches on MSN. In addition, eBay, the largest auction site on the web, has a version called AdContext. Pay-per-click advertising is not without its problems—especially “click fraud”, the practice of generating bogus clicks for devious reasons, such as making a rival advertiser pay for nothing. Nonetheless, pay-per-click remains much more efficient than traditional marketing for many advertisers. It is the fastest-growing segment of the online advertising market (see chart).
因为这种广告模式是有利可图的，所有的互联网门户都想跟上Google的步伐。2003年，雅虎，这家互联网最大的媒介公司，以16亿美元的价格从Gross手里收购了Overture。然后，放弃了Google公司提供的技术许可权。然后，微软公司旗下的MSN，另一家大型互联网门户，建立了adCenter，作为“货币化引擎”一个版本，现在已经带替了雅虎作为MSN搜索的广告系统。另外，eBay，互联网最大的拍卖网站，拥有一个叫AdContext.的版本。点击付费广告也不是没有缺陷－特别是“点击欺诈”，以某种不正当的原因产生的欺诈性的点击，比如为了让竞争对手的广告失效。然而，对于大多数广告主来说，点击付费比传统的市场营销方式要有效得多。它是互联网广告市场中增长最快的部分。（见表）
Some companies are already exploring other methods of charging advertisers for consumers‘ actions. Mike Hogan, the boss of ZiXXo, a start-up near San Francisco, says that he is “disrupting the existing coupon system”, dominated by companies such as Valpak and Valassis in America. Some 335 billion coupons were distributed in America last year—priced, like other traditional media, in CPM—but only 4.5 billion were redeemed, which amounts to a “Wanamaker waste” of almost 99%. ZiXXo, by contrast, lets advertisers issue coupons online and places them on search results, online maps and other such places, but charges advertisers only when a consumer prints one out (50 cents per coupon from next year), thus expressing an intent to redeem it.
许多公司已经在探索以消费者的行动来向广告主收费的其他方法了。Mike Hogan，一家建立在旧金山的公司－ZiXXo的老板，说他“正在瓦解现存的优惠券系统”这个系统在美国被Valpak 和 Valassis这样的公司掌控着。去年美国大概有3350亿美元的优惠券被发放，—传统媒体一样，以CPM(每千人成本)计算定价—但是只有45亿美元的数量被赎回，相当于说99%成了“沃纳梅克浪费”。 ZiXXo，相反地，让广告主在网上发布优惠券并把它们放在搜索结果，在线地图，以及其它这样的地方。但是仅仅当消费者把它打印出来（50美分一张第二年可使用）因此表达出了一种兑换的愿望时，才向广告主收费。
As ZiXXo is pioneering “pay-per-print” advertising, Ingenio, another San Francisco firm, is betting on “pay-per-call”. Instead of coupons, it places toll-free telephone numbers on local-search pages—its biggest partner is AOL—and charges advertisers only when they receive a live call from a consumer. This is especially popular among accountants, lawyers, plumbers and other service providers who find it easier to close a deal on the telephone. EBay is planning to sell pay-per-call advertising on a larger scale, by placing little buttons from Skype, an internet-telephony firm it bought last year, on its own web pages and perhaps those of others, so that consumers can talk with a seller after just a single click.
就在ZiXXo开创了“打印付费”广告模式的时候，旧金山的另一家公司，Ingenio，投注于一种叫“呼叫付费”的广告模式中。与优惠券不同的是，它把免费电话号码放在本地搜索的网页上—它最大的股东是美国在线—只有当广告主接到一个从消费者打来的有效电话他才需要为他的广告支付费用。这种广告模式在会计师，律师，管道工人以及其他服务提供者中特别受欢迎。他们发现这种方式能够更加容易地完成一项交易。EBay打算在更大范围内销售这种“呼叫付费”的广告，它可以通过在自己和其他的网站上放置来自Skype的小按钮，这样消费者可以在一次简单的点击之后直接与卖家通话。Skype是EBay去年购买的一家提供语音通话服务的互联网技术公司。
Meanwhile, Mr Gross, almost famous from his first innovation (and not at all bitter that Google got most of the credit), is once again busy pursuing what he considers the “Holy Grail” of advertising—the complete elimination of Wanamaker waste. He calls this cost-per-action, or CPA, although he means cost-per-sale, and says that it “just makes too much sense” not to catch on. His start-up this time is called Snap.com, a small search engine. An airline, say, that advertises on Snap‘s search results would pay not when a consumer clicks on its link but only when he buys a ticket. Google, which is researching almost all conceivable advertising methods, also has plans for CPA. Its new Google Checkout, an online payments system set up to rival eBay‘s PayPal, will allow Google to know more about how many users who click on one of its advertisements subsequently go on to complete a purchase.
以此同时，格罗斯先生，因为他的第一次创新而出名（他一点也不怀恨Google获得了大部分的荣誉）他重新开始忙碌地寻找他认为的广告的“圣杯”—沃纳梅克浪费的完全消除。他把它称之为“真实购买行为付费”（CPA），虽然他称之为CPA，但他说那里“有太多的含义”没法表达出来的。他这次是以一家小的搜索引擎公司—Snap.com开始做起的。一家航空公司说，基于Snap.com搜索结果的广告客户不是按点击付费的，只有当消费者的点击导致他购买了机票，广告客户才需要付费。而Google，几乎调查研究了所有的广告模式，也已经开始计划采用“CPA”模式。它新推出的Google Checkout，是一个在线的支付系统，为了和eBay的 PayPal竞争而建立的，这个系统可以让Google更好地了解有多少用户因为点击了它的广告而导致了最终的购买行为。
Branded
品牌
If the internet enables such sna performance-based advertising methods, it is also sparking a renaissance in branded advertising. Some products—such as mortgages—might conceivably be sold entirely through performance-based marketing one day, says Mr Stuart at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, but many other products—such as cars, cosmetics and alcohol—will probably always require branding as well. Even when consumers start their shopping research on a search engine, they still see several competing sponsored links, and may be swayed by their previous brand exposure in deciding which one of these links to click on. And in the “offline” world, brands are still “the ultimate navigation device,” says Mr Tobaccowala at Denuo, and often determine which door a tired traveller far away from home walks through.
如果因特网使如此了不起的以表现为基础的广告方式成为可能，它也就能够点燃品牌广告复兴的火花。一些产品—像抵押贷款－可以想像地有一天可以完全通过以表现为基础的营销方式来出售，交互式广告局的Stuart先生说。但是很多的其他产品—像汽车，化妆品和酒精－或许也都需要自己的品牌，因为即使消费者是通过搜索引擎开始他们的购物调查，他们仍然会发现好些赞助商的链接，而先前的品牌接触仍然可能是导致消费者在选择点击这些链接中的哪一个时犹豫不决的原因。Denuo的Tobaccowala说：在“离线”世界里，品牌仍然是“最终的导航器”，常常决定一个疲惫的从远方归来的旅行者从哪一扇门走进家中。
Brand advertising is inherently about leaving an impression on a consumer,and thus about some sort of exposure. On the internet, however, an exposure can also be tied to an action by a consumer, and these actions can be counted, tracked and analysed in ways that exposure in the established mass media cannot. Consumers also tend to be more alert on the internet. Whereas people might watch a television show in a semi-comatose state of mind and at obtuse angles on their couches, consumers typically surf the web leaning forward while “paying attention to the screen,” says Mr Stuart.
品牌广告从根本来说是给消费者留下一个印象，因此多少有些暴光的味道。然而，在互联网上，一次暴光也同样和一次顾客行为联系在一起，而这些顾客行为是可以以某种方式被统计，跟踪，分析的，这在传统的大众媒体中是无法实现的。消费者当然也倾向于在互联网上更加谨慎小心。尽管人们可能在一个昏昏欲睡的状态下，身体不自觉地前倾成一个钝角的时候收看一个电视节目，但一般情况下冲浪者一般都会把身体向前倾斜一点“密切关注着电脑屏幕”， Stuart这样说。
A good example is video games, which increasingly take place online and involve thousands or millions of other players. Companies such as Massive and Double Fusion are already placing two-dimensional brand advertisements into games. A player moving through the streets of New York to kill something or other might see a DHL truck or a billboard. “But the future is intelligent three-dimensional ads” and “ads with behaviour,” says Jonathan Epstein, Double Fusion‘s boss. For instance, his technology will soon allow Coca-Cola to place a Coke can into a game, where it fizzes when a player walks by and might give him certain powers if he picks it up. If a character uses a mobile phone inside a game, the technology can swap the brand and model of the phone depending on which country the player is in. But the most important aspect of the technology, says Mr Epstein, is that it will track exactly how long the player uses the phone, thus leaving no doubt about whether an “impression” had indeed been made.
电脑游戏是一个很好的例子，它们在互联网上日益增多并且吸引成千上万的玩家。像Massive 和Double Fusion这样的网络公司已经在它们的游戏产品中放置二维的品牌广告。一位玩家如果正朝纽约大街移动企图破坏某个设施，他或许能够看到一辆敦豪快递的卡车或者是一个广告牌。“但未来的方向是智能的三维广告”和“直接效果广告” Double Fusion的老板，Jonathan Epstein说。比如，他的技术很快就可以允许可可可乐公司在他的游戏中放置一个可乐罐头，当一位玩家的路过的时候如果他拣起这个罐头的时候他就会获得某种能量，那时他会是多么兴奋啊。
Propagating the message
信息传播
That same transparency is now coming to “viral” marketing. Kontraband, a firm in London, takes funny, bizarre, conspiratorial or otherwise interesting video clips from its clients and places them on its own site and on popular video-sharing sites such as YouTube.com or Google Video. The hope in viral marketing is to create something that is so much fun that it will propagate by itself, as people e-mail it to each other or put the web link on their blogs. This means that a pure “cost-per-feed” system is out of the question, says Richard Spalding, Kontraband‘s co-founder, since a successful viral campaign “that gets out of hand and is watched by millions would run the client out of business.” So Kontraband charges a flat fee based on a hoped-for audience, leaving the client with the economic upside if the real audience turns out to be larger. The important point, says Mr Spalding, is once again that the “sprites” (ie, bits of software) inside the video let Kontraband track exactly how many times a video is viewed and where, so that clients can see neat pie charts that summarise their success.
病毒式营销方式也变得更加透明化。一家在伦敦的叫Kontraband的公司，从他的客户那里弄来一些幽默，奇异，恶搞以及其他有趣的视频剪辑，然后把它们放在自己的网站和其他像YouTube.com 或者Google Video那样的流行视频共享网站。他们希望通过病毒式营销方式能够创造一些很有趣的东西而引发短片的自我传播，就像人们通过邮件互相转发或者把相关网页的链接放在自己的博客上。“这表明单纯的‘回馈付费’系统是无法实现的。”Kontraband公司的合伙创办人Richard Spalding说。他刚成功地举办了一次病毒式营销活动，这个活动“最终失去了控制，有几百万人收看我们制作的视频短片，为我们的客户带来了无数的生意”。所以Kontraband用一种比较恰当的方式－以期望到达的受众为基础向客户收费。如果客户的录像获得了更大范围的传播，他们将获得更大的经济利益。Spalding先生说：至关重要的一点是，又一次录像中的精灵（小块的软件）让Kontraband能够精确地跟踪他的视频有多少次被人观看，以及在哪里被观看。这样客户就可以制定出圆形分格统计图表来概括他们的成功。
Understandably, this strange and thrilling online world can be unsettling to the old hands of the advertising industry, whether they are marketing bosses for advertisers or intermediaries at the agencies. “All of us have been classically trained, and now we‘re in a jazz age,” says Mr Tobaccowala. Advertisers and their agents, he recalls, have already changed their minds about the internet twice. During the technology boom of the late 1990s, he says, the general outcry was, “Oh my god, I need a dotcom unit.” When the boom turned to bust at the beginning of this decade, he says, there was a sigh of relief (“See, the internet is not for real.”), and it suddenly seemed as though only those who did not “get it” still had jobs.
完全可以理解，这种前所未有的令人毛骨悚然的在线世界给传统的广告产业带来了严重的不安。无论他们是广告客户的营销经理还是广告中介机构的成员。“我们的所有同胞受的是古典主义的训练，但现在是一个爵士的时代。”Tobaccowala说。广告客户和他们的代理商，他回忆，已经两次改变了他们对网络的看法。在网络技术发达兴隆的九十年代后期，他说，人们大声疾呼，“我的主啊，我需要一个互联网公司。”在21世纪初期那几年，当互联网的泡沫破灭的时候，他们这么哀叹：“看，网络毕竟不是真实的。”但事实很快证明只有那些当初“不懂”的人才最终幸存了下来。
This was a mistake, says Mr Tobaccowala,since the sceptics confused the performance of the NASDAQ and the fate of individual dotcoms with genuine changes in consumer behaviour. In the consumer-driven market for classified advertising, for instance, ordinary people instinctively grasped the efficiencies of online sites such as Craigslist, thus causing a drop in classified revenues at newspapers. The large advertisers stayed more conservative, however, which may explain why the internet-advertising market is still disproportionately small. The Online Publishers Association, a trade group, estimates that all web advertising in America came to about 6% of total advertising expenditures last year, even though consumers spent 23% of their media time online.
这是一个错误，Tobaccowala说，自从怀疑论者给纳斯达克的行情带来了混乱，个别网络公司的命运在消费者行为方面发生了根本的变化。在顾客驱动的分类广告市场，比如，平民百姓本能地抓住像Craigslist这样的在线网站的效率，这导致了报纸的分类广告收入的下降。大的广告客户始终比较保守，然而，这或许正好解释了为什么互联网广告分额只有一个小的不相称的比例。一个行业组织，在线出版商协会，他们估算，虽然美国的消费者去年把23%的媒体接触时间给了互联网，但是，网络广告总量却只占总的广告支出的6%。
Now, however, chief executives are taking trips to Silicon Valley, often without their “chief marketing officers”, to educate themselves. And what they hear impresses them. Tim Armstrong, Google‘s advertising boss in North America, preaches to his clients a “notion of asset management” for their products that “shocks” them. Traditionally, he says, most firms would advertise only 5% to 10% of their wares—the blockbusters—in the mass media to publicise their brand, hoping that it shines a halo on the remainder of their products. Now, however, “companies market each individual product in that big digital stream,” says Mr Armstrong, from the best seller to the tiniest toothbrush. This is called exploiting the economics of the “long tail”.
现在，然而，首席执行官们到硅谷旅行的时候往往不带上他们的“市场营销总监”，他们要自己培训。他们在硅谷的所见所闻给他们留下了深刻的印象。Google在北美的广告负责人，告诫他的客户们“要有资产管理的理念”，并说看到他们的产品使他感到震惊。传统意义上，他说，大部分公司会拿出他们收入的5%－10%来做广告。他们利用巨型－大众传播媒介来宣传他们的品牌。希望他们的产品能在消费者心中留下一个美丽的光环。现在，然而，“公司在那些巨大的数据流中销售每个个别的产品” Armstrong说，从畅销书到微型牙膏。这些被称之为开发经济学中的“长尾”。
They do this, first, because the internet, in effect, eliminates scarcity in the medium. There are as many web pages for advertisers as there are keywords that can be typed into a search engine, situations that game players might find themselves in, and so forth. Each one comes with its own context, and almost every context suits some product. The second reason is that if you can track the success of advertising, especially if you can follow sales leads, then marketing ceases to be just a cost-centre, with an arbitrary budget allocated to it. Instead, advertising becomes a variable cost of production that measurably results in making more profit.
他们这么做，首先，是因为互联网，有效地消除了媒介中的缺乏。那里有足够多的网页可供广告客户把他们的关键字输入到某个搜索引擎中去，或者那些游戏玩家能够自己找到他们的地方等等。每一条广告都有他们相应的情景内容，而且每一个情景内容都符合某些产品。第二个原因是你能跟踪广告的成功，特别是你能跟随销售路线，然后营销就不再仅仅以成本为中心，武断地做出预算分配了。现在，广告变成了能够带来更多利润的产品的可测定的可变成本。
This often leads to more subtle changes in the way that advertisers think about their craft, says Mr Armstrong. In the traditional media, he says, advertisers are always “trying to block the stream of information to the user” in order to “blast their message” to him. That quickly gets annoying and turns consumers off. In American prime-time television, advertising interruptions added up to 18 minutes an hour last year, up from 13 minutes an hour in 1992, according to Parks Associates. On the internet, by contrast, advertisers have no choice but to “go with the user,” says Mr Armstrong, and “the information coming back from the users is more important than the messages going out.”
那些广告客户们考虑到这些其实给他们的的同行带来了更多微妙的变化，Armstrong说，在传统媒体中，广告客户们经常“尝试防碍用户的信息流”从而能够更多地“传送自己的广告信息”。这很快就让消费者讨厌并使他们最终离开。在美国，电视的黄金时间，广告的干扰在从1992年的每小时13分钟增加到了去年的每小时18分钟，根据Parks Associates的统计数据。“在互联网上，相反地，广告客户除了跟着消费者走以外没有其他的办法。”Armstrong
这样说。
For consumers this may turn out to be the biggest change. The kids in “Generation Y”, “echo-boomers” and “millennials”—young people who tend to be adept at using media, constantly online and sceptical—are increasingly immune to the clichés of prime-time television and radio and mentally tune out these nuisances. Online, however, they may accept advertising, if it is unobtrusive, relevant and fun.Insofar as they took some action to invite the advertisement, they may even find it useful. And this, aptly enough, is a consumer reaction that John Wanamaker would have expected all along.
这些变化对消费者来说可能是最大的了。那些“Y一代”，“回声潮一代”，“千禧一代”的孩子们――年轻的人们能够熟练地使用媒体，频繁地在线，充满怀疑精神――逐步对那些毫无生机的电视黄金时间、收音机产生了免疫力，并在内心上拒绝这些令人讨厌的东西。然而，在网上，他们也许可以接受广告，如果它们不唐突，跟他们相关，或者很有趣的话。在这个范围之内他们会采取一些行动回应那些广告，甚至可能发现它们的一些用处。而这些，再恰当不过了，不就是John Wanamaker曾经一直苦苦期待的消费者反应吗？
Special Report From The Economist Translate by skyun
Thanks to the power of the internet, advertising is becoming less wasteful and its value more measurable
由于互联网的力量，广告投放变地不那么浪费，而它的价值的可测量性正在提高。
IN TERMS of efficiency, if not size, the advertising industry is only now starting to grow out of its century-long infancy, which might be called “the Wanamaker era”. It was John Wanamaker, a devoutly Christian merchant from Philadelphia, who in the 1870s not only invented department stores and price tags (to eliminate haggling, since everybody should be equal before God and price), but also became the first modern advertiser when he bought space in newspapers to promote his stores. He went about it in a Christian way, neither advertising on Sundays nor fibbing (thus minting the concept of “truth in advertising”). And, with his precise business mind, he expounded a witticism that has ever since seemed like an economic law: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted,” he said. “The trouble is, I don‘t know which half.”
如果从效率不是规模的角度来说，广告产业才刚刚开始走出它一个世纪长的幼年期，也可以说是它的“沃纳梅克时代”。 沃纳梅克是来自费城的一位虔诚的基督教商人，在19世纪70年代，他不仅发明了百货商店和价格标签（从此消除了争价，使得在上帝和价格面前人人平等），而且当他通过购买报纸的版面空间来促进商品销售的时候，成为了第一个现代广告人。他用基督教的方式从事这种活动，即不在星期天做广告也不对客户撒慌。（因此创造了“无欺诈广告”的概念）。有着精确的商业思维的他，用一句直到今天看起来像一个经济法则的俏皮话解释了广告这个东西。“我花在广告上的钱有一半是浪费了，”他说，“可问题是，我不知道是哪一半。”
Wanamaker‘s wasted half is not entirely proverbial. The worldwide advertising industry is likely to be worth $428 billion in revenues this year, according to ZenithOptimedia, a market-research firm. Greg Stuart, the author of a forthcoming book on the industry and the boss of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade association, estimates that advertisers waste—that is, they send messages that reach the wrong audience or none at all—$112 billion a year in America and $220 billion worldwide, or just over half of their total spending. Wanamaker was remarkably accurate.
沃纳梅克的“一半浪费论”并不完全只是一个谚语。根据一家叫“实力传播”的市场调查公司的统计结果：全世界广告业今年的总收入大概是在4280亿美元左右。Greg Stuart，一本即将出版的关于广告行业的书籍的作者，也是一家叫“交互广告局”的同业协会的老板。他估计广告客户的浪费――即他们把广告信息发送给错误的受众或者根本就没有到达受众的部分――美国一年是1120亿美元而世界范围内是2200亿美元，正好接近他们广告总量的一半。沃纳梅克的说法非常准确。
What Wanamaker could not have foreseen, however, was the internet. A bevy of entrepreneurial firms—from Google, the world‘s most valuable online advertising agency disguised as a web-search engine, to tiny Silicon Valley upstarts, many of them only months old—are now selling advertisers new tools to reduce waste. These come in many exotic forms, but they have one thing in common: a desire to replace the old approach to advertising, in which advertisers pay for the privilege of “exposing” a theoretical audience to their message, with one in which advertisers pay only for real and measurable actions by consumers, such as clicking on a web link, sharing a video, placing a call, printing a coupon or buying something.
沃纳梅克当初没有预测到的是互联网的出现。一群创业公司的出现――从谷歌，一家这个世界上最有价值的伪装成网络搜索引擎的在线广告代理公司，到那些很小的甚至只有几个月大小的硅谷暴发户。他们都忙着向他们的广告主销售新型的营销工具以减少浪费。尽管他们以不同的方式，但是，有一点相同的是：他们希望采用一种新的广告模式，在这种模式下，
广告客户只需为那些真正的和可测量的广告受众行为付费。（比如点击一个网页链接，共享了一个视频，打出了一个电话，印刷了一张赠券或者购买了某些产品）。来取代原有的广告模式，即广告客户为他们的广告信息在理论上能够“暴光到”的客户付费。
Rishad Tobaccowala, the “chief innovation officer” of Publicis, one of the world‘s biggest advertising groups, and boss of Denuo, a Chicago-based unit within Publicis with the job of probing the limits of new advertising models, likens traditional Wanamaker-era advertising to “an atom bomb dropped on a big city.” The best example is the 30-second spot on broadcast television. An independent firm (such as Nielsen, in America) estimates how many television sets are tuned to a given channel at a given time. Advertisers then pay a rate, called CPM (cost per thousand), for the right to expose the implied audience to their spot. If Nielsen estimates that, say, 1m people (“the city”) are watching a show, an advertiser paying a CPM of $20 would fork out $20,000 for his commercial (“the atom bomb”).
Rishad Tobaccowala,世界上最大的一个广告集团－阳狮的“首席创新官”，也是阳狮旗下一家设在芝加哥的以探查新广告模式的缺陷为目标的公司的老板。他把沃纳梅克时代的广告比作“一颗原子弹扔在一座大城市。”最好的例子就是广播电视上30秒广告。会有一家独立的公司（像美国的尼尔森）估算有多少台电视机在某一个时段收看某个频道。然后，广告主为一个比率付费，这个比率叫每千人成本。因此来取得向暗涵的潜在客户暴光广告内容的权利。如果尼尔森评估说，这个城市中有100万人在收看某个电视节目，则一个广告主以20美元的千人成本计算的话，他总共需要为他的广告（原子弹）支付2万美元。
Gone for a brew
The problem is obvious. The television room may be empty. Its owners may have gone to the kitchen to make a cup of tea or to the toilet. They may have switched channels during the commercial break, be napping or talking on the telephone. The viewer may be a teenage girl, even though the advertisement promotes Viagra. It might even be a TiVo or other such device that records the show so that the owner can watch it later and skip through the commercials. Parks Associates, a consumer-technology consultancy, estimates that 10m American households already have a digital video recorder.
这种模式的缺陷是非常明显的。放电视的房间也许是空的。它的主人可能去厨房泡一杯茶或者是上厕所去了。在广告出现的时候他们可能已经转换频道，或者在织毛衣，打电话什么的。
甚至一个关于伟哥促销的广告，受众却可能是个十几岁的小女孩。受众也可能通过TiVo这样的录像设备把节目录制下来而跳过那些商业广告。Parks Associates，一个消费者技术咨询服务公司，估算每千万个美国家庭中，已经有一台数码影音录像设备。
“Segmentation”, an advertising trend during the past two decades tied to fragmentation in the media, represents only a cosmetic change, thinks Mr Tobaccowala. Advertisers airing a spot on a niche channel on cable television, for example, might be able to make more educated guesses about the audience (in their 30s, gay and affluent, say), but they are still paying a CPM rate in order blindly to cast a message in a general direction. Instead of atom bombs on cities, says Mr Tobaccowala, segmentation is at best “dropping conventional bombs on villages”. The collateral damage is still considerable.
Tobaccowala先生认为：依靠媒介细分而进行的“市场细分”，作为过去二十年来广告发展的一个趋势，仅仅表现出一些表面上的变化。广告主在一个有线电视的利基频道投放广告，例如，也许能够对受众作出更有依据的推测（30岁上下，富有的，同性恋者），但是他们仍然为了在一个大致的方向盲目地投放他们的广告信息而支付一个CPM（每千人成本比率）。Tobaccowala说，虽然不同于原子弹在城里爆炸，所谓的细分也只不过是把原来的扔在了村子里而已。间接的损失仍然相当大。
By contrast, the new advertising models based on internet technologies amount to innovation. Instead of bombs, says Mr Tobaccowala, advertisers now “make lots of spearheads and then get people to impale themselves.” The idea is based on consumers themselves taking the initiative by showing up voluntarily and interacting with what they find online.
相反地，建立在网络技术也就是创新基础上的新型广告模式取代了原先的，Tobaccowala说，现在广告主“制造了大量的先头部队然后让人们自己陷入其中。”这种想法是建立在消费者自己带头自愿地暴露并与他们在网上找到的产品信息产生互动。
In its simplest form, this involves querying a search engine with keywords (“used cars”, say), then scanning the search results as well as the sponsored links from advertisers, and then clicking on one such link. In effect, the consumer has expressed an intention twice (first with his query, then with his click). The average cost to an advertiser from one such combination is 50 cents, which corresponds to a CPM of $500; by contrast, the average CPM in traditional (“exposure”) media is $20. A consumer‘s action, in other words, is 25 times as valuable as his exposure.
在这种简单的模式中，包括了用户用关键字询问某个搜索引擎（“二手车”比如），然后扫描搜索的结果和广告主赞助的链接。实际上，消费者已经在这个过程中两下次表达了他的意图（第一次是他的询问，然后是他的点击）。一个广告主从这样一次结合中的平均成本是50美分，相应的CPM（每千人成本）是500美元；相比之下，传统（暴露）媒体的每千人成本20美元。换句话说，导致消费者的行动的价值，是仅仅的广告信息暴露的25倍。
The person who deserves more credit than anybody else for this insight is Bill Gross, an internet entrepreneur with a kinetic mind and frenetic speech who in 1996 started Idealab, a sort of factory for inventions. One of the companies to come out of his factory was GoTo.com, later renamed Overture, which pioneered the market for “paid search” or “pay-per-click” advertising. In 2001 Mr Gross ran into Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the young co-founders of Google, a search engine that was just then becoming popular, but still had no way of making money. He offered them a partnership or merger, but Messrs Brin and Page were purist at the time about not diluting the integrity of their search results with commercialism and they turned him down.
比任何人都更应该接受这项荣誉的是Bill Gross，一个有着活跃的思维和疯狂的言论的互联网企业家，他在1996年开创了一种专门提供创新产品的工厂－Idealab。从这个工厂中产生出一个叫“GoTo.com”的公司，稍后改名叫“Overture”，这个公司牵引广告市场走向“搜索付费”或“点击收费”。2001年的时候，Gross先生照会Sergey Brin 和Larry Page。一家叫“Google”的搜索引擎公司的两个年轻的合伙创办人，他们的公司就在这个时候变地很受欢迎，但始终没有找到公司的盈利模式。Gross提出和他们的公司合股或者合并的要约。但Sergey Brin 和Larry Page在那个时候持纯化论的立场，他们不愿意看到搜索结果的诚实性被商业主义所稀释，所以最终拒绝了Gross的请求。
Within a year, however, Messrs Brin and Page changed their minds and came up with AdWords, a system based on Overture‘s idea of putting advertising links next to relevant search results and charging only for clicks (but with the added twist that advertisers could bid for keywords in an online auction). Google soon added AdSense, a system that goes beyond search-results pages and places “sponsored” (ie, advertising) links on the web pages of newspapers and other publishers that sign up to be part of Google‘s network. Like AdWords, these AdSense advertisements are “contextual”—relevant to the web page‘s content—and the advertiser pays for them only when a web surfer clicks. Together, AdWords and AdSense produced $6.1 billion in revenues for Google last year.
然而，不到一年，Messrs Brin 和Page改变了他们的想法并且想到了AdWords（关键字广告计划），这是一个建立在Overture的想法基础上的广告系统――他们把广告放在相关搜索结果旁边，然后只按该广告的点击量收费。（但一个附加的条件是广告主必须在一次网络拍卖中为相应的关键字竞标）。Google很快又推出了AdSense计划，这个系统则建立在搜索结果的网页之外，“赞助”的广告链接放置在那些与Google签订了协议成为其AdSense网络系统
的一部分的报纸和其他出版物的网页上。和AdWords一样，这些AdSense也是“情景化的”
—跟相应网页的内容有关—只有当广告被网上冲浪者点击的时候，广告主才需要付费。总的加起来，过去的一年里，AdWords和AdSense为Google带来了61亿美元的收入。
Because this advertising model is so lucrative, all internet portals want to catch up with Google. In 2003 Yahoo!, the largest media property on the web, bought Overture from Mr Gross for $1.6 billion. Yahoo! then dropped the technology it had been licensing from Google. Then Microsoft, which owns MSN, another large internet portal, built adCenter, its version of a “monetisation engine”, which has now replaced Yahoo! as the advertising system for searches on MSN. In addition, eBay, the largest auction site on the web, has a version called AdContext. Pay-per-click advertising is not without its problems—especially “click fraud”, the practice of generating bogus clicks for devious reasons, such as making a rival advertiser pay for nothing. Nonetheless, pay-per-click remains much more efficient than traditional marketing for many advertisers. It is the fastest-growing segment of the online advertising market (see chart).
因为这种广告模式是有利可图的，所有的互联网门户都想跟上Google的步伐。2003年，雅虎，这家互联网最大的媒介公司，以16亿美元的价格从Gross手里收购了Overture。然后，放弃了Google公司提供的技术许可权。然后，微软公司旗下的MSN，另一家大型互联网门户，建立了adCenter，作为“货币化引擎”一个版本，现在已经带替了雅虎作为MSN搜索的广告系统。另外，eBay，互联网最大的拍卖网站，拥有一个叫AdContext.的版本。点击付费广告也不是没有缺陷－特别是“点击欺诈”，以某种不正当的原因产生的欺诈性的点击，比如为了让竞争对手的广告失效。然而，对于大多数广告主来说，点击付费比传统的市场营销方式要有效得多。它是互联网广告市场中增长最快的部分。（见表）
Some companies are already exploring other methods of charging advertisers for consumers‘ actions. Mike Hogan, the boss of ZiXXo, a start-up near San Francisco, says that he is “disrupting the existing coupon system”, dominated by companies such as Valpak and Valassis in America. Some 335 billion coupons were distributed in America last year—priced, like other traditional media, in CPM—but only 4.5 billion were redeemed, which amounts to a “Wanamaker waste” of almost 99%. ZiXXo, by contrast, lets advertisers issue coupons online and places them on search results, online maps and other such places, but charges advertisers only when a consumer prints one out (50 cents per coupon from next year), thus expressing an intent to redeem it.
许多公司已经在探索以消费者的行动来向广告主收费的其他方法了。Mike Hogan，一家建立在旧金山的公司－ZiXXo的老板，说他“正在瓦解现存的优惠券系统”这个系统在美国被Valpak 和 Valassis这样的公司掌控着。去年美国大概有3350亿美元的优惠券被发放，—传统媒体一样，以CPM(每千人成本)计算定价—但是只有45亿美元的数量被赎回，相当于说99%成了“沃纳梅克浪费”。 ZiXXo，相反地，让广告主在网上发布优惠券并把它们放在搜索结果，在线地图，以及其它这样的地方。但是仅仅当消费者把它打印出来（50美分一张第二年可使用）因此表达出了一种兑换的愿望时，才向广告主收费。
As ZiXXo is pioneering “pay-per-print” advertising, Ingenio, another San Francisco firm, is betting on “pay-per-call”. Instead of coupons, it places toll-free telephone numbers on local-search pages—its biggest partner is AOL—and charges advertisers only when they receive a live call from a consumer. This is especially popular among accountants, lawyers, plumbers and other service providers who find it easier to close a deal on the telephone. EBay is planning to sell pay-per-call advertising on a larger scale, by placing little buttons from Skype, an internet-telephony firm it bought last year, on its own web pages and perhaps those of others, so that consumers can talk with a seller after just a single click.
就在ZiXXo开创了“打印付费”广告模式的时候，旧金山的另一家公司，Ingenio，投注于一种叫“呼叫付费”的广告模式中。与优惠券不同的是，它把免费电话号码放在本地搜索的网页上—它最大的股东是美国在线—只有当广告主接到一个从消费者打来的有效电话他才需要为他的广告支付费用。这种广告模式在会计师，律师，管道工人以及其他服务提供者中特别受欢迎。他们发现这种方式能够更加容易地完成一项交易。EBay打算在更大范围内销售这种“呼叫付费”的广告，它可以通过在自己和其他的网站上放置来自Skype的小按钮，这样消费者可以在一次简单的点击之后直接与卖家通话。Skype是EBay去年购买的一家提供语音通话服务的互联网技术公司。
Meanwhile, Mr Gross, almost famous from his first innovation (and not at all bitter that Google got most of the credit), is once again busy pursuing what he considers the “Holy Grail” of advertising—the complete elimination of Wanamaker waste. He calls this cost-per-action, or CPA, although he means cost-per-sale, and says that it “just makes too much sense” not to catch on. His start-up this time is called Snap.com, a small search engine. An airline, say, that advertises on Snap‘s search results would pay not when a consumer clicks on its link but only when he buys a ticket. Google, which is researching almost all conceivable advertising methods, also has plans for CPA. Its new Google Checkout, an online payments system set up to rival eBay‘s PayPal, will allow Google to know more about how many users who click on one of its advertisements subsequently go on to complete a purchase.
以此同时，格罗斯先生，因为他的第一次创新而出名（他一点也不怀恨Google获得了大部分的荣誉）他重新开始忙碌地寻找他认为的广告的“圣杯”—沃纳梅克浪费的完全消除。他把它称之为“真实购买行为付费”（CPA），虽然他称之为CPA，但他说那里“有太多的含义”没法表达出来的。他这次是以一家小的搜索引擎公司—Snap.com开始做起的。一家航空公司说，基于Snap.com搜索结果的广告客户不是按点击付费的，只有当消费者的点击导致他购买了机票，广告客户才需要付费。而Google，几乎调查研究了所有的广告模式，也已经开始计划采用“CPA”模式。它新推出的Google Checkout，是一个在线的支付系统，为了和eBay的 PayPal竞争而建立的，这个系统可以让Google更好地了解有多少用户因为点击了它的广告而导致了最终的购买行为。
Branded
品牌
If the internet enables such sna performance-based advertising methods, it is also sparking a renaissance in branded advertising. Some products—such as mortgages—might conceivably be sold entirely through performance-based marketing one day, says Mr Stuart at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, but many other products—such as cars, cosmetics and alcohol—will probably always require branding as well. Even when consumers start their shopping research on a search engine, they still see several competing sponsored links, and may be swayed by their previous brand exposure in deciding which one of these links to click on. And in the “offline” world, brands are still “the ultimate navigation device,” says Mr Tobaccowala at Denuo, and often determine which door a tired traveller far away from home walks through.
如果因特网使如此了不起的以表现为基础的广告方式成为可能，它也就能够点燃品牌广告复兴的火花。一些产品—像抵押贷款－可以想像地有一天可以完全通过以表现为基础的营销方式来出售，交互式广告局的Stuart先生说。但是很多的其他产品—像汽车，化妆品和酒精－或许也都需要自己的品牌，因为即使消费者是通过搜索引擎开始他们的购物调查，他们仍然会发现好些赞助商的链接，而先前的品牌接触仍然可能是导致消费者在选择点击这些链接中的哪一个时犹豫不决的原因。Denuo的Tobaccowala说：在“离线”世界里，品牌仍然是“最终的导航器”，常常决定一个疲惫的从远方归来的旅行者从哪一扇门走进家中。
Brand advertising is inherently about leaving an impression on a consumer,and thus about some sort of exposure. On the internet, however, an exposure can also be tied to an action by a consumer, and these actions can be counted, tracked and analysed in ways that exposure in the established mass media cannot. Consumers also tend to be more alert on the internet. Whereas people might watch a television show in a semi-comatose state of mind and at obtuse angles on their couches, consumers typically surf the web leaning forward while “paying attention to the screen,” says Mr Stuart.
品牌广告从根本来说是给消费者留下一个印象，因此多少有些暴光的味道。然而，在互联网上，一次暴光也同样和一次顾客行为联系在一起，而这些顾客行为是可以以某种方式被统计，跟踪，分析的，这在传统的大众媒体中是无法实现的。消费者当然也倾向于在互联网上更加谨慎小心。尽管人们可能在一个昏昏欲睡的状态下，身体不自觉地前倾成一个钝角的时候收看一个电视节目，但一般情况下冲浪者一般都会把身体向前倾斜一点“密切关注着电脑屏幕”， Stuart这样说。
A good example is video games, which increasingly take place online and involve thousands or millions of other players. Companies such as Massive and Double Fusion are already placing two-dimensional brand advertisements into games. A player moving through the streets of New York to kill something or other might see a DHL truck or a billboard. “But the future is intelligent three-dimensional ads” and “ads with behaviour,” says Jonathan Epstein, Double Fusion‘s boss. For instance, his technology will soon allow Coca-Cola to place a Coke can into a game, where it fizzes when a player walks by and might give him certain powers if he picks it up. If a character uses a mobile phone inside a game, the technology can swap the brand and model of the phone depending on which country the player is in. But the most important aspect of the technology, says Mr Epstein, is that it will track exactly how long the player uses the phone, thus leaving no doubt about whether an “impression” had indeed been made.
电脑游戏是一个很好的例子，它们在互联网上日益增多并且吸引成千上万的玩家。像Massive 和Double Fusion这样的网络公司已经在它们的游戏产品中放置二维的品牌广告。一位玩家如果正朝纽约大街移动企图破坏某个设施，他或许能够看到一辆敦豪快递的卡车或者是一个广告牌。“但未来的方向是智能的三维广告”和“直接效果广告” Double Fusion的老板，Jonathan Epstein说。比如，他的技术很快就可以允许可可可乐公司在他的游戏中放置一个可乐罐头，当一位玩家的路过的时候如果他拣起这个罐头的时候他就会获得某种能量，那时他会是多么兴奋啊。
Propagating the message
信息传播
That same transparency is now coming to “viral” marketing. Kontraband, a firm in London, takes funny, bizarre, conspiratorial or otherwise interesting video clips from its clients and places them on its own site and on popular video-sharing sites such as YouTube.com or Google Video. The hope in viral marketing is to create something that is so much fun that it will propagate by itself, as people e-mail it to each other or put the web link on their blogs. This means that a pure “cost-per-feed” system is out of the question, says Richard Spalding, Kontraband‘s co-founder, since a successful viral campaign “that gets out of hand and is watched by millions would run the client out of business.” So Kontraband charges a flat fee based on a hoped-for audience, leaving the client with the economic upside if the real audience turns out to be larger. The important point, says Mr Spalding, is once again that the “sprites” (ie, bits of software) inside the video let Kontraband track exactly how many times a video is viewed and where, so that clients can see neat pie charts that summarise their success.
病毒式营销方式也变得更加透明化。一家在伦敦的叫Kontraband的公司，从他的客户那里弄来一些幽默，奇异，恶搞以及其他有趣的视频剪辑，然后把它们放在自己的网站和其他像YouTube.com 或者Google Video那样的流行视频共享网站。他们希望通过病毒式营销方式能够创造一些很有趣的东西而引发短片的自我传播，就像人们通过邮件互相转发或者把相关网页的链接放在自己的博客上。“这表明单纯的‘回馈付费’系统是无法实现的。”Kontraband公司的合伙创办人Richard Spalding说。他刚成功地举办了一次病毒式营销活动，这个活动“最终失去了控制，有几百万人收看我们制作的视频短片，为我们的客户带来了无数的生意”。所以Kontraband用一种比较恰当的方式－以期望到达的受众为基础向客户收费。如果客户的录像获得了更大范围的传播，他们将获得更大的经济利益。Spalding先生说：至关重要的一点是，又一次录像中的精灵（小块的软件）让Kontraband能够精确地跟踪他的视频有多少次被人观看，以及在哪里被观看。这样客户就可以制定出圆形分格统计图表来概括他们的成功。
Understandably, this strange and thrilling online world can be unsettling to the old hands of the advertising industry, whether they are marketing bosses for advertisers or intermediaries at the agencies. “All of us have been classically trained, and now we‘re in a jazz age,” says Mr Tobaccowala. Advertisers and their agents, he recalls, have already changed their minds about the internet twice. During the technology boom of the late 1990s, he says, the general outcry was, “Oh my god, I need a dotcom unit.” When the boom turned to bust at the beginning of this decade, he says, there was a sigh of relief (“See, the internet is not for real.”), and it suddenly seemed as though only those who did not “get it” still had jobs.
完全可以理解，这种前所未有的令人毛骨悚然的在线世界给传统的广告产业带来了严重的不安。无论他们是广告客户的营销经理还是广告中介机构的成员。“我们的所有同胞受的是古典主义的训练，但现在是一个爵士的时代。”Tobaccowala说。广告客户和他们的代理商，他回忆，已经两次改变了他们对网络的看法。在网络技术发达兴隆的九十年代后期，他说，人们大声疾呼，“我的主啊，我需要一个互联网公司。”在21世纪初期那几年，当互联网的泡沫破灭的时候，他们这么哀叹：“看，网络毕竟不是真实的。”但事实很快证明只有那些当初“不懂”的人才最终幸存了下来。
This was a mistake, says Mr Tobaccowala,since the sceptics confused the performance of the NASDAQ and the fate of individual dotcoms with genuine changes in consumer behaviour. In the consumer-driven market for classified advertising, for instance, ordinary people instinctively grasped the efficiencies of online sites such as Craigslist, thus causing a drop in classified revenues at newspapers. The large advertisers stayed more conservative, however, which may explain why the internet-advertising market is still disproportionately small. The Online Publishers Association, a trade group, estimates that all web advertising in America came to about 6% of total advertising expenditures last year, even though consumers spent 23% of their media time online.
这是一个错误，Tobaccowala说，自从怀疑论者给纳斯达克的行情带来了混乱，个别网络公司的命运在消费者行为方面发生了根本的变化。在顾客驱动的分类广告市场，比如，平民百姓本能地抓住像Craigslist这样的在线网站的效率，这导致了报纸的分类广告收入的下降。大的广告客户始终比较保守，然而，这或许正好解释了为什么互联网广告分额只有一个小的不相称的比例。一个行业组织，在线出版商协会，他们估算，虽然美国的消费者去年把23%的媒体接触时间给了互联网，但是，网络广告总量却只占总的广告支出的6%。
Now, however, chief executives are taking trips to Silicon Valley, often without their “chief marketing officers”, to educate themselves. And what they hear impresses them. Tim Armstrong, Google‘s advertising boss in North America, preaches to his clients a “notion of asset management” for their products that “shocks” them. Traditionally, he says, most firms would advertise only 5% to 10% of their wares—the blockbusters—in the mass media to publicise their brand, hoping that it shines a halo on the remainder of their products. Now, however, “companies market each individual product in that big digital stream,” says Mr Armstrong, from the best seller to the tiniest toothbrush. This is called exploiting the economics of the “long tail”.
现在，然而，首席执行官们到硅谷旅行的时候往往不带上他们的“市场营销总监”，他们要自己培训。他们在硅谷的所见所闻给他们留下了深刻的印象。Google在北美的广告负责人，告诫他的客户们“要有资产管理的理念”，并说看到他们的产品使他感到震惊。传统意义上，他说，大部分公司会拿出他们收入的5%－10%来做广告。他们利用巨型－大众传播媒介来宣传他们的品牌。希望他们的产品能在消费者心中留下一个美丽的光环。现在，然而，“公司在那些巨大的数据流中销售每个个别的产品” Armstrong说，从畅销书到微型牙膏。这些被称之为开发经济学中的“长尾”。
They do this, first, because the internet, in effect, eliminates scarcity in the medium. There are as many web pages for advertisers as there are keywords that can be typed into a search engine, situations that game players might find themselves in, and so forth. Each one comes with its own context, and almost every context suits some product. The second reason is that if you can track the success of advertising, especially if you can follow sales leads, then marketing ceases to be just a cost-centre, with an arbitrary budget allocated to it. Instead, advertising becomes a variable cost of production that measurably results in making more profit.
他们这么做，首先，是因为互联网，有效地消除了媒介中的缺乏。那里有足够多的网页可供广告客户把他们的关键字输入到某个搜索引擎中去，或者那些游戏玩家能够自己找到他们的地方等等。每一条广告都有他们相应的情景内容，而且每一个情景内容都符合某些产品。第二个原因是你能跟踪广告的成功，特别是你能跟随销售路线，然后营销就不再仅仅以成本为中心，武断地做出预算分配了。现在，广告变成了能够带来更多利润的产品的可测定的可变成本。
This often leads to more subtle changes in the way that advertisers think about their craft, says Mr Armstrong. In the traditional media, he says, advertisers are always “trying to block the stream of information to the user” in order to “blast their message” to him. That quickly gets annoying and turns consumers off. In American prime-time television, advertising interruptions added up to 18 minutes an hour last year, up from 13 minutes an hour in 1992, according to Parks Associates. On the internet, by contrast, advertisers have no choice but to “go with the user,” says Mr Armstrong, and “the information coming back from the users is more important than the messages going out.”
那些广告客户们考虑到这些其实给他们的的同行带来了更多微妙的变化，Armstrong说，在传统媒体中，广告客户们经常“尝试防碍用户的信息流”从而能够更多地“传送自己的广告信息”。这很快就让消费者讨厌并使他们最终离开。在美国，电视的黄金时间，广告的干扰在从1992年的每小时13分钟增加到了去年的每小时18分钟，根据Parks Associates的统计数据。“在互联网上，相反地，广告客户除了跟着消费者走以外没有其他的办法。”Armstrong
这样说。
For consumers this may turn out to be the biggest change. The kids in “Generation Y”, “echo-boomers” and “millennials”—young people who tend to be adept at using media, constantly online and sceptical—are increasingly immune to the clichés of prime-time television and radio and mentally tune out these nuisances. Online, however, they may accept advertising, if it is unobtrusive, relevant and fun.Insofar as they took some action to invite the advertisement, they may even find it useful. And this, aptly enough, is a consumer reaction that John Wanamaker would have expected all along.
这些变化对消费者来说可能是最大的了。那些“Y一代”，“回声潮一代”，“千禧一代”的孩子们――年轻的人们能够熟练地使用媒体，频繁地在线，充满怀疑精神――逐步对那些毫无生机的电视黄金时间、收音机产生了免疫力，并在内心上拒绝这些令人讨厌的东西。然而，在网上，他们也许可以接受广告，如果它们不唐突，跟他们相关，或者很有趣的话。在这个范围之内他们会采取一些行动回应那些广告，甚至可能发现它们的一些用处。而这些，再恰当不过了，不就是John Wanamaker曾经一直苦苦期待的消费者反应吗？