British online marketing ahead of U.S. : They’re smarter

Interesting article in the NY Times this morning about British online advertising exceeding that in the States. Nearly 8 percent of British ad dollars went online, compared with 4.6 percent in the United States.

Some believe it’s because of the national focus of advertising in Britain, as opposed to local in the United States. Others like Yahoo CEO Terry Semel believe the US is just lagging a year or two behind.

Consensus seems to be that the Brits may just be smarter, buying into the benefits of Internet advertising: “that it is easy to track, enormously effective and a relative bargain.”

I don’t buy the local argument. Even organic search results in the search engines can be localized. I just had a client walk into my office this evening who just picked up two clients from out of the area looking for a firm here in Seattle. They found their blog doing a simple search on Google or one of the other search engines.

And their search engine optimized blog costs them $2,400 a year. Certainly more cost effective than offline advertising.