Lately, there is increased coverage of so called "new advertising opportunities in the broadband age". Unfortunately they all focus on streaming multimedia versions of the same old story, as if the people all got their ADSL subscription for that one to come. Ok, I enjoy some of the funny ads and broadband will allow increased reuse of them, but overall - putting on my user hat - I don't see much to get excited about. In my opinion, the true innovators in online advertising will look beyond the technical specs of the fatter pipes but more at how this infrastructure allow people to change their overall behavior.
There are two important things beyond the ability for multimedia downloads, that I consider importnat: The effect of being always on and the much better response times. Both will not only change the general media consumption pattern (i.e. increased internet usage, the importance of the web as information source for an increasing number of activities and interests) but they will also change the way applications work.
Today, the page impression is the dominant unit of online advertising exposure. However, what it stands for already varies a lot: Not only in the target audience (where the current discussion among marketers is focused on) but also on the amount of clutter on page - including other advertisements - and basic duration of said impression. And my prediction, is that coming usage patterns will diversify the meaning of page impression into the realm of the meaningless.
Always on will bring us the ones that will last for dozens of minutes to several hours, hosting short interactions with no overall starts and ends. The clueless will invariably introduce ads that reload every 30 seconds, invariably of the user watching or being busy doing something else.
Better response times will introduce the few-seconds pageview, lasting only long enough for the eye to catch the single small nugget of information the user expects and short enough to ignore the rest. This will be the come-and-leave applications with dozens of visits per day, but only very short sessions and page layouts memorized in the reflexive parts of our brains (think dictionaries, stock quotes, public transport schedules (next bus), etc.). This will also be the next-next-next applications, akin to the quick browsing through your paper catalogs (skip skip skip) where better response times mean lower barriers to the next click and which mean the scanning of a lot of raw information in short periods of time.
A few years ago, a page that loaded 20 seconds was normal. Today three seconds seems slow. If broadband increases the overall pace of usage, why would anyone accept waiting for a 30 seconds spot to finish more than they did before?
What kind of advertising products not only survive in that environment, but actually incorporate themselves into these new workflows? Which "enrich the experience" in a way that helps the user instead of annoying him? With it new units of measurements beside the page impression and the click through will have to emerge. Unfortunately, since new units always slow down the adoption. On the other hand, keeping the wrong units too long will damagingly misrepresent the value of online adverising.
Update: Apparently, P&G's marketing chief thinks into a similar direction, at least in the more general aspects of where the advertising industry should move to: "For each element of the marketing mix, we should ask ourselves, 'Would consumers choose to look at or listen to this,' and let that be the benchmark" he said in a critical speech to the American Association of Advertising Agencies.
Posted by seefeld at February 12, 2004 23:31I do agree. today, the problem still seems to be that a lit of marketer (and even onlinemarketer) just put the tv ad on the net in form of a huge banner. Interactivity they understand as bringing different versions of banners and as you say it, streaming technology. Well, streaming will take his place without dout (and I don't think, that the people will have to wait 30 seconds -> real time streaming) but after all, the potential of the internet lies in building relationships and not attacking people with millions of new ways trying to influence them. So, I think that the future of advertising in the internet hopefully will not see an explosion, more a change. TV, print ads etc. will be used to lead the people to the internet to build relationships with them and branding will be done here. The rest just will surf for not loosing the connection (like: "have you visit our site today?") I think, pushing up the ads (rich media they call it, no?) is not the right way, because you shouldn't try to influence them with an ad to buy something - this is way to heavy and difficult - just lead them to your site, where you can build a longlasting relationship and that's what counts.
Check out our gallery of interactive advertising (what some call advergames). I'd be curious to know what you think of them.
John
Posted by: John Gregory at July 22, 2004 10:36 PM