To Look but not to See: That is the Banner

Sat, 2008-May-3 by nmw.

Relevance is in the Eye of the Beholder

Gord Hotchkiss writes a column at Search Engine Land called “Just Behave” — and in his most recent installment (”Human Hardware: You’re Looking, But Are You Seeing?“) he covers a topic that describes some fundamental phenomena concerning how people typically “perform” information retrieval processes. Basically: people block out information that isn’t relevant to whatever is the focus of attention.

So What?

So that means when people a looking for shoes, then if they don’t care about hotels at that moment, then they will not see any message regarding hotels. People will tend to search out and find shoes.com if/when they are focused on buying shoes and they will search out and find hotels.com when they’re looking for a hotel room. Therefore, if you want to sell shoes, it would be good to advertise them on a site like shoes.com, and if you want to offer hotel rooms for rent, then you might want to advertise on a site like hotels.com. Indeed: When people want to find shoes, they don’t even want to see a banner ad about shoes or even any advertising at all — they just want find a place where they can get the information they want.

This was the basis of the old fashioned “yellow pages” — and the yellow pages are well on their way to be being replaced by keyword domain names — names like “shoes” or “hotels” or “clothing” or “cars” or similar keywords which match the “information consumer’s” focus of attention on market sectors for which there is a high level of information demanded…. And this demand for information is ultimately fueled by a demand for the corresponding products and services themselves. Successful marketers ought to meet that demand with a corresponding supply.

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