I personally don’t believe in advertising
Have you ever thought about how much money is spent on all the advertising that jumps out at you while browsing the Internet?
In Google, sometimes you have to scroll through two screens to see the actual results under the ads.
In general, I won’t complain too much. You already know how much advertising clutters the Internet and more.
In the photo — a project to clean up the city, where all the banners were removed in Photoshop. Doesn’t it make it easier to breathe?
Let’s talk about the relevance of advertising.
I couldn’t find any statistical data on the Internet (I would appreciate any leads), but I can say for sure that even with all the personalization and theft of personal data, Facebook is not able to show me at least 30% relevant ads.
Usually, they show something completely inappropriate.
Now for the most interesting part: let’s talk about the economic factor.
All these promo videos, creatives, posters, brochures, they are paid for by someone.
Imagine the unimaginable amount of money (600+ billion $ annually) that is spent daily on all this unnecessary advertising.
But this money is not thrown into the ocean. Where does the money go?
It feeds the already omnipotent giants: Google and Facebook.
It is safe to say that it was advertising that made them rich, not the romantic story about innovation and changing lives. For example, more than 80% of Google’s revenue still comes from advertising, while most of their other services are unprofitable.
And the giants, in turn, occupy more and more advertising spaces and control the market, dictating their rules.
Today, Internet businesses need traffic like oxygen. But it is Facebook and Google that will decide whether your business will breathe or not.
In general, I would call advertising the most environmentally unfriendly type of marketing.
But is there a way out?
There are more environmentally friendly types of marketing: quality content and hyper-targeted outreach.
Imagine the internet filled with useful content instead of annoying ads.
Ordinary cold outreach isn’t much better than advertising.
When I was the director of an American company, hundreds of people from India and the Middle East contacted me via private messages and company emails, trying to offer me services that I didn’t need at all.
It became such a big problem that I had to change my email addresses, and LinkedIn completely died for me, as there was nothing but spam there.
But when I really needed outsourced testers and posted about it on LinkedIn, the post got only 3 likes.
All these companies wanted to talk, but they did not want to listen.
When my partners and I were working on the marketing strategy for our IT company, we decided not to knock on doors. Instead, we would listen carefully.
That’s how the idea of selling services to those who really need them was born.
We succeeded in this with the help of Upwork — by analyzing the platform, we could identify demand and make hyper-targeted outreach to potential clients.
But we went further and combined several platforms similar to Upwork in our lead generation service.
But this is just the beginning. Now we are developing a protocol that, with the help of artificial intelligence and big data, can determine demand across the entire internet in real-time.
To put it simply: instead of “selling a garage,” we carefully look for those who want to buy a garage.
For developers: imagine being able to run an SQL query on everyone who needs a garage at this very minute.
So, we called the protocol OraQL (Oracle).
Now it is used in our service for scanning freelance exchanges and job marketplaces — GigRadar.io
BTW it’s live now, and everyone can get a demo on our website.
Vadym
Founder
