Online marketing has been positioned from the beginning as a much more interactive marketing medium than TV. As the web becomes more of a constant thing in our lives will our interactions with it become more passive like TV and thus change the way we market online?

Online marketers have always stuck their noses up at TV advertising because they couldn’t believe advertisers would spend so much money on a medium that was not trackable, was interruptive, was not precisely targeted, had no ability to engage the user further once the ad ended, was not shareable. Surely TV ads are inferior.

But when the amount of time people spend online is constant you need new math. The number of sites visited before a purchase as reported by google is growing exponentially – is this because people do more research or is it just because people spend more time online? When browsing is something that never ends, creating attribution models around touch points that weave in and out of constant browsing habits start to look futile. The sheer fact that someone showed up at your ecommerce site used to be a pretty strong signal of purchase intent and every time they didn’t convert was deemed a failure. Now, with mobile usage skyrocketing the value of a visit is dropping fast.

In the end the traditional principles of TV advertising – where you interrupt and grab attention by inserting advertising into an appealing environment and then make that advertising message entertaining, beautiful or interesting is maybe all that may really works after all. The majority of online advertising hasn’t been focused on that as much as it’s been focusing on precise targeting, number of “likes” and optimization.