First things first:

A brief history on how and why the digital ghetto came to pass…
It started back in the mid-1990s, when the youthful digital marketers of the dot com era first decided (unconsciously) to abandon brand reach for the sudden, technology-driven promise to micro-target audiences – all in an effort to distinguish the digital channels from their more established (and credible) analog counterparts.  In retrospect, it was a tragically bad idea, for manifold reasons, but mainly because the practical result was to eradicate online the one thing big brands truly want – scalable, big brand reach – irrespective of the medium.

In the myopic fog of their big-budget envy, digital marketers saw fit to raise a firewall between themselves and other media professionals.  The same self-imposed firewall, however, very soon gave rise to a digital ghetto mentality, one with its own unique marketing vernacular, and its own rules of engagement.  The digital denizens inside the ghetto “got it” while those beyond the ghetto walls didn’t (in spite of their obvious success and big agency clout).

Sure enough, digital marketers became their attention, and the frustration they felt at their utter inability to crack big media budgets at big media agencies soon evolved into a doleful refrain that continues unabated to this day.  Digital media budgets remained disproportionately small, and digital media campaigns never truly evolved beyond what might be described as a perpetual test mode.  Meanwhile, evolutionary thinking in the digital media channels pretty much started and stopped with search marketing in the late 1990s, while almost all subsequent digital contributions to the larger brand advertising dialogue continued the micro-targeting folly.  Predictably, niche audiences continued to shrink with each technological iteration, until the tallest-midget competition that ensued resembled a variation of the Maccabi Games – fun perhaps for the digital ghetto dwellers to debate amongst themselves, but without much gravitas or impact in the much larger world beyond the ghetto walls.

Fast forward: There’s only one thing at the end of the day that will raze the digital ghetto walls, only one thing that will set the digital ghetto dwellers free.  Digital marketing’s messiah – like that of every other commercial medium – is scalable big brand reach, the same big brand reach that made print, radio and television so immensely powerful and successful throughout the last half of the 20th century, and the same big brand reach whose sudden absence in the first decade of the 21st century now threatens virtually all media channels across the board.  Ironically, while the ability to deliver big brand reach in the digital era is now greatly diminished across print, radio and TV franchises, the prospects for scalable big brand reach online are finally – with the saturation of online video – poised to emerge.

Fortunately for digital marketers, the successful emergence of big brand reach online (not to mention the access to big brand media budgets that will surely ride shotgun with it) doesn’t require the development or addition of any new technologies whatsoever.  Quite the contrary: if anything, the promise of big brand reach and big brand budgets online can only be delivered by a process of deliberate simplification, one that begins – as always – with subtraction and disintermediation.

What does that mean?  First and foremost it means we need to stop trying to finagle new ways to distribute intermediary ad messages to consumers who just don’t want to see them and are thoroughly equipped and utterly inclined to avoid them.  It means we need to remove the intermediary layers of targeting technology and messaging that currently stand – like the walls of the digital ghetto – between consumers and brands, the same layers of targeting and technology that have driven up costs and otherwise done nothing to enhance brand communications for the past generation.  Heretically, it means we need far less targeting, not more.

It means we need to replace the ads that no one wants with something everyone wants instead: video.  (Everyone with high-speed access snacks on video; indeed, there’s almost no other conceivable reason for anyone to pay for high-speed access.)  And while we’re at it, it means we need to change our marketing metaphors as well.  Instead of targeting, instead of hunting elusive consumers with high-tech ammo, we’re far better advised to cast a line with better low-tech bait, and let them come to us.  We’re far better advised to fish rather than hunt.

In reality, commercial media are and always have been on-demand, regardless of the medium, and audiences everywhere always behave in the same binary fashion: either they deign to show up or they don’t.  Either way, the decision is theirs alone, and has little or nothing to do with our ability or desire to target and hunt them down, and everything to do with the bait we use to attract them.  Thus, in the much larger reality just beyond the digital ghetto walls, we never really reach the audience at all; we don’t need to because — in the on-demand world of commercial media — the audience always reaches us. And here’s the kicker: they always qualify themselves en route. The fundamental commercial audience/content dynamic always remains constant and intact, irrespective of the medium: certain content attracts certain audiences, plain and simple.

Razing the digital ghetto…
Attract, deliver and engage: the three component parts of a successful online ad campaign.  Clearly, the current advertising-as-intermediary model can’t measure up.  It doesn’t attract consumers – who don’t want the ads in the first place – so it can’t possibly deliver them anywhere in scale, and the quality of the engagement at the destination site (like everything else) has taken a distant back seat to our obsession with targeting.

What to do?  We need to invert the model: instead of burying the ad message in the content, we need to bury the content in the ad message. We need to attract, deliver and engage the audience in a manner and place that…

1. doesn’t intrude upon consumer privacy,
2. doesn’t put the brands themselves at risk in the process, and
3. puts the terms and conditions of the engagement itself completely in the hands of the advertisers (who pay for everything).

The best way to accommodate all three of the above conditions is to…

1. use the lure of quality video content (instead of ads) as bait to attract consumers, then
2. deliver them – self-qualified, of course – directly to advertiser destination websites, where
3. the promised video content is consumed on site as an integral component of more immersive, risk-free and engaging brand environments.

Attract, deliver and engage. Of course, it’s harder now than in years past, in large part because – until recently – brand advertising was only expected to engage and deliver (no one in their right mind expected the ads to attract anyone).  The early radio and TV pioneers knew full well what the first generation of digital marketers seem to have forgotten (or, more likely, never learned in the first place): that no audience would ever be attracted to a program for the ads, and that the ads were – at best – tolerated, and only then because no one wanted to get up off the couch to change channels.  Well, those days are long gone, and the only excuse for the legacy advertising-as-intermediary model that still dominates to this day is sheer industry inertia and the perceived absence of viable alternatives.

While no amount of technological lipstick can turn this sow’s ear into a silk purse, we have the opportunity – right now – to raze our digital ghetto walls and replace them with the real Holy Grail of advertising: scalable, big brand reach. But we can’t do it by targeting our audiences to death.  Nor can we do it with wishful thinking, by convincing ourselves that audiences somehow demand relevant ads.  Technology is not the answer (Albert Einstein once observed that no problem can be solved by the same thinking that created the problem).  So remember the simple keys to advertising success online:  First, subtract and disintermediate; get rid of what you know doesn’t work.  Then, design your online campaigns to attract, deliver and engage. Don’t push.  Pull.