Media conferences always serve up a fair share of one-liners, but at this year's Abu Dhabi Media Summit, it was Jonathan Perelman, vice-president of agency strategy at Buzzfeed, who took the crown for king of quotes.
"You're more likely to summit Mount Everest than click on a banner ad," he told a room full of delegates at Yas Viceroy, Abu Dhabi. Moments earlier he had posed a question to the room: "Has anybody been on the internet in the past 24 hours?" Naturally, every hand in the room shot up, before Perelman followed up with another question: "Can you remember the last banner ad you saw?"
No hands went up.
It's a good illustration of how ineffective some in the media sector see more traditional display ads. "There's been this industrial complex built around banner ads for 18 or 19 years, and we used to see a 40 to 70% click through rate when they started."
But today, your chances of scaling the world's highest mountain are more favourable than clicking on a banner ad, he said. "It's not good advertising, frankly."
Perelman, speaking in a session about new media and new marketing channels, also turned his focus to the native advertising (where ads and content are seamlessly merged into a single website experience) and its application and use in publishing: "Google AdWords is native; you type in something and the ads are delivered to you natively – that is going to be the only way forward for publishers to monetise their content."
Buzzfeed – described by Perelman as "the media company for the social age" – is a native advertising publisher itself. And it seems to be working; in a recent memo to the Buzzfeed team, Jonah Peretti, the company's founder and chief executive, revealed that the company had "booked record profit in August", reaching record traffic of 85 million unique visitors for the month.
"Nobody comes to Buzzfeed to look at the ads, but they'll come for the content," said Peretti. "When the advertising is content – good content they're willing to click on and engage with, and share if it's good – that's the future for publishers."
But what about distributing that content? "Content is king, but distribution is queen, and she wears the pants," Perelman said in another pithy one-liner. "You have to create good content – you start with that as a base… but you have to understand how it's going to travel and spread in the social world."
For Perelman, and Buzzfeed, it's all about data analysis. "I think what you have to draw are insights," he said. "I think data is worthless unless you can draw insights from it … why did this piece of content travel really far on Twitter, but not as far on Facebook? Why is something really big on Pinterest, but it didn't get any pickup whatsoever on StumbleUpon?"
For Buzzfeed, it's a strong argument, as Perelman revealed of the site: "70% of our traffic comes in via social."
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