Display advertising is incredibly inefficient

I think the biggest problem is how online display ads are sold.  The current setup exists because of the history of how it evolved and the lack of speed with which these organizations have been able to adapt.  The publishers continue to sell their inventory on websites through the same inefficient chain of phone calls between account managers and clients just as they did 50 years ago, when they were selling print media and that process actually made sense.   On the reciprocating end the agencies are buying the media for clients, using all of the same tedious insertion orders and other old fashioned procedures that they always have.  The agencies keep hiring media buyers and the publishers keep hiring online sales people and the process goes on.

Google image ads has changed all of this.  Their system makes it incredibly easy to buy exactly the slice of targeting and share of voice you want.  If only Yahoo, the NYT, the Washington Post and all of the other old media companies (yes I count Yahoo in that) would sell their traffic on Google Image Ads or build a similar system, life as an advertiser would be a lot easier.  The experience for the consumer would be drastically improved and I would be a happy man.

For now, we can only hope someone takes Yahoo and does a leveraged buyout and irons out all of their inefficiencies.  Their management sure as heck doesn’t seem up to the job.