New Wine in Old Wineskins

Back in the day before glass bottles and the use of corks, wine was carried around and transported in skins made from various different kinds of animals, namely goat skins. As you can imagine, people back then went through a good amount of wine and tangentially through a good amount of wine skins (How many wine bottles a month do you go through?).

This was not the problem, obviously. The problems arose when people who lacked understanding of what they were doing tried to put new wine into old wineskins. Because the old wineskins were weathered and inflexible, when faced with the fermenting new wine, they would expand, explode and the wine would be wasted.

See any parallels with antiquated forms of advertising and the interactive marketplace?

Interactive is a completely new and different ballgame and I see too much use of old wineskins. We are dealing with a medium that contains within its fibers elements of connection, response, instant communication and interactivity. Our marketing and advertising solutions must have these same elements weaved into our fibers.

We are dealing with an explosive and dynamic medium and because advertisers are still using antiquated techniques users are doing everything they can to run away - look at the explosion of Mozilla's Firefox browser. Why is this?

In my opinion, it is because most of the time advertisers are trying to get people to look at content solely for the sake of force feeding them advertising. The majority of the effort is spent chasing people down rather than have them come to us.

Internet users generally know what they want and know where to go. If they do not, they use search engines. Search based advertising has worked to some extent because advertisers are catching people when they are in an inquisitive state of mind.

The rest of the time, the majority of web advertising attmepts to distract eyeballs and lead individuals down an unintended path.

We must look to solutions that take advantage of the inherent properties of the web (personalization, interactivity, communication, dialogue) in order to more effectively connect with our users. All of our efforts must be focused around these very simple, yet powerful concepts. Doing this we begin to put new wine in new wineskins.