Brands are buying banner ad space again, giving media companies a reason to rejoice.
According to Ben Smith, media columnist for The New York Times, “several privately held publishers said their first-quarter ad revenue was up strikingly over the same quarter last year: Insider by more than 30 percent; Bloomberg Media was up 29 percent; Vice, 25 percent; Bustle Digital Group, more than 25 percent; and Axios’s quarterly ad revenue nearly doubled, executives at those companies told me.
“Ad spending is red-hot right now,” says Henry Blodget, a co-founder of Insider (formerly Business Insider), which was early to introduce a subscription tier in 2017. “The economy is cranking up, travel and leisure are coming back, and consumers are emerging from their pandemic cocoons.
How The Times Runs A Mid-Page Banner
Note the copy surrounding the ad above. It says branded events are coming back this year in a big BIG way.
Pay To Play, Or Get Out of the Way
In related news, marketing strategist Ian Barnard has done some math on organic social media and his equations are brutal.
Even by growing their following by 7900% – an unrealistic expectation – most companies can only expect to raise awareness in their target segments by a maximum of 2% using organic social media.
You will not reach 98% of your target audience, no matter how good your content is.
This is why paid social is so, so important.
Today, as before, it takes money to make money.
When you have a service or product to promote, it’s not going to happen because you land on a cool domain name or because you write and post new articles to your website each week. To spark interest and generate word of mouth at scale—the best form of advertising in the world—you first must pay to play. There’s simply too much well-written and designed information available at the swipe of a finger for even the best organic content to pull enough people in with any consistency and strength of signal.
When the goal is to cultivate a small and tightly focused audience, go ahead and lean into organic as we’ve done for 16 years here on Adpulp.com. On the other hand, when your goal is to interest thousands of people every day in what you are selling, step up to the paid advertising plate, where you can increase reach and customize messaging for each significant market segment or persona.
