Google vs. Facebook

If you are an Internet Marketer, or marketer in general, you need to read this recent article from Wired by Fred Vogelstein about the control for marketing dollars (mainly from huge firms that do "branding" campaigns), to get them online.

This is a great read, but as an online marketer, and one who firmly believes in performance-based marketing (campaigns that only pay when an action happens i.e. a sale, a lead, etc.), my gut is that the amount of "branding" done in the future will be less and less.

I could be way wrong on this, but I think this current slump in the economy has focused a lot of marketing attention to things that get results, or at least have a proven ROI behind them. As more and more top level executives (CEOs and CFOs) see this model working in hard economic times, why wouldn't they want it during good times as well? The only glitch could be the number of partner sites and properties that don't want to participate in performance marketing.

My experience is that if a site doesn't want to do a performance-based deal it usually means their traffic sucks (or at least isn't the traffic you want for whatever campaign you are working on).

As the web continues to evolve I suspect more and more properties will not only be open to performance marketing campaigns, but I suspect this channel of online marketing will come to dominate the sector. If indeed that is the case, Facebook and Google could be barking up the wrong tree (at least in reference to this Wired article).

Share your thoughts on this great read from Wired.