Nicholas Coleridge, the managing director of Condé Nast once said that cover-mounts on magazines were the "crack-cocaine" of the magazine industry.
However, this was not just some glib statement conceived by an old-school wordsmith to grab headlines.
It was an insightful observation by a perceptive leader in his field about the nature of over reliance on an invention that initially delivered massive profits but ultimately ended up becoming a debilitating sickness to the industry.
Something similar is happening in our industry with performance marketing, and paid search in particular.
The endless investment in search is slowly eroding the advertising ecosystem and if clients don’t start weaning themselves off it and find alternative cures, it will gradually start eating away at their ROI and ultimately their profits - one click at a time.
For the past five or six years all anyone has cared about is performance and the last click.
Too much value is put on the last click and search gets all the credit from that; so much credit in fact, that .
Linus Gregoriadis, Econsultancy’s UK research director, said: "Companies continue to report an increased media cost for paid search, and in particular for Google AdWords, but this has not stopped the majority of companies increasing their Google investment.
"Sixty percent of company respondents said they are investing more on Google than they were a year ago, compared to only 10% who are spending less."
More than two thirds (69%) of search advertisers who use Google say that prices for the keywords they routinely bid on have gone up in the past year.
An even higher proportion of agencies (71%) say this is the case.
At Goviral we believe in building value through all parts of the funnel, not just in converting users that should have been partly or fully persuaded by relevant information and content at an earlier stage.
Obviously we’re not saying that search and lower funnel spend doesn’t add value, of course it does, but the argument remains valid.
The attribution models currently applied to the online space rely too heavily on technology to measure effect at the point of conversion and fail to explain why people were interested in the first place.
Brands and differentiation are ultimately built by catering well for both the attention, engagement and consideration stage of the journey - not by paid links.
Paid search may boost sales with a group of undecided buyers looking for the best deal and allow advertisers to attack market share on generic search terms - but it is hardly a way to protect margin and a unique market position.
Long term success online comes from getting the balance right in spend between the different layers.
It’s easy to see why search gets the credit, though. The trap is elegantly put and the road there drizzled with strong initial performance.
Only too late do clients realise that they’re hooked on search and they see no other option than to spend more and more cash to get the necessary fix, further depleting the upper parts of the funnel.
The underlying problem is that the amount of generic searches, for say running shoes, is constant so to keep share and conversion up when users lack interest in you, investment has to go up (remember there are also competitors, and it is an auction model).
This instigates a debilitating vicious circle.
Brand affinity doesn’t just increase natural search, it also helps create higher margins (Apple/Nike) and helps launch new products.
Clients need to be brave and take the steps to break their dependency on search.
With a well planned online marketing strategy you can achieve great ROI from search, while also offering consumers content and experiences they can engage in and share - building the brand’s awareness, customer loyalty and long term profit.