Cuban is no Newspaper man
Scott Anderson pointed me to Mark Cuban’s (you know I don’t subscribe to that crap 
) talk of local newspaper sales reps selling adsense and SEO wisdom. Cuban obviously doesn’t work at a newspaper.
Pure hogwash.
Here is what I commented on Scott Anderson’s (Onsquared.com) blog:
No way. Aint gonna happen.
IF (capital IF) the newspaper sales staff could be adequately trained to understand SEO and adsense style marketing, the amount of time it would take to explain, set up, and sell to a local shop for likely a fraction of what a print ad revenue would be. . .
It’s mixing oil and water.
News corporations should have been , and should still be, creating their own content, ad, and social networks (or buying them) and competing on the same playing field, not some hybrid one.While it seems logical to want to leverage existing relationships and migrate them, unfortunately the web has changed how we need to relate with each other, especially businesses and their clients and customers.
I just don’t see web marketing in the future blending well with a sales rep sauntering into a local shop and saying ‘How do you do?’
In fact, the only reason why it has any level of success currently is because the perceived value of print ads is fogging the local advertisers vision of value on the web.
In the future, perceived value will be meaningless and actual value will be the only thing that matters.
Pay-per-click will evolve to pay-per-action. While pure branding has it’s place for some time to come, who can deny that Adsense singlehandedly changed the name of the game.
I told a Sales Manager once that pay-per-click was the future, and they laughed at me.
They wouldn’t laugh now, but they might if I told them pay-per-action was.