The lagging online ad market, more

Kaiser at Ogilvy reports about a meeting he had with 50 Tsinghua EMBA-students, all senior executives of Chinese companies. He asked them about their explanation for the fact that consumers spend a huge percentage of their time online, while ad companies keep on pouring most of their marketing budgets into TV-stations.

The answers were intriguing, honest, and often very funny: One gentleman basically said that at least in China, people in a position to determine ad spend spend all their days actually running their businesses, and their evenings getting drunk at Karaoke parlors, and they can’t be bothered with learning about the Internet. Others said that marketing decision-makers extrapolate from their own Internet use, which is very purpose-driven: they hunt for specific bits of information and never bother to look at ads. Most boiled down to “it’s a generational thing,” and everyone was confident that the gap will close.