Publications

By George John, ClickZ, Mar 18, 2009

An old joke told in nerdy circles is that you can tell IBM didn't invent the car because IBM would have built the car with a saddle, stirrups, and reins to be backwards-compatible with the horse. (My great-uncle might have appreciated that; his first test drive of a Model T ended with him crashing the car into a house while shouting "Whoa!" with increasing urgency and emphasis.)

By contrast, Henry Ford famously quipped, "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." Ford focused not on stated need but on latent need. In doing so, he solved the actual problem of getting quickly from place to place, at whim, possibly accompanied by friends or baggage, and at a cost within reach of his target market.

In online advertising, there is a lot of faster-horse building and buying going on, a lot of work putting reins and saddles onto cars, and relatively little actual car building and buying. Online advertising offers vastly different opportunities and economies relative to physical media, yet it is often bought and sold in the same way.

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