Monday, October 11, 2010
New Factors in Advertising
Before the internet took off in the last two decades, the primary means of advertising were in television commercials and newspaper/magazine ads. These were essentially static advertising. By that I mean, you had to watch the TV commercials between breaks and you had to look at ads on the paper. There was little flexibility there. However, with TIVO, people are able to record their shows and skip through ads during commercial breaks. If advertisers were to stay in business, they would have to deal with this new technology and create shorter, catchier ads that could hold someone's attention when the viewer actually has the option of skipping them. A new study just came out showing the short attention span for web videos, providing evidence to the notion that with this flexibility in choices, people are becoming more and more impatient. On the web, people have millions of options on what to view, and so the desire to sit through videos becomes less and less. Ads will once again have to find a way to keep up. Twenty years ago, people were essentially forced to view certain ads, now the choices lead to an optimization of ads towards viewer preferences. Yet viewers now are much less willing to wait around for a punchline they might actually enjoy. So there is a new twist that advertisers must deal with: they not only have to appeal to viewer preferences, but they also have to understand that the viewer's preference itself is changing due to the flexibility he/she has when dealing with this new medium.
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ReplyDeleteThere are a number of important elements here, but none more so than interactivity. While it's true the attention span has gone down, the outcome desired by the advertisers is now far more action-oriented.
ReplyDeleteIn the past, advertisers placed static messages in attempt to either enhance brand recognition or to more directly influence purchase intent. Ads failed if they were unable to accomplish those goals. In the digital age, the goals are more actionable in real-time, i.e. a user is encouraged to click on a banner/link or is instructed to visit a webpage, share a posting, submit a photo, etc. The difference in goals represents a shift in how advertising messages are created, and subsequently how much time is needed to capture a viewer's attention.
Because of this, I would argue that personalization capabilities and creative use of delivery channels are enabling ads to become increasingly effective. We just don't often see this because the vast majority of advertisers fail to see the potential.
In addition to advertisers needing to adjust for a new set of demands from their audience (as Prem discusses) and the benefits of interactivity (as Scott discusses), it seems that there is another dimension to this discussion. I certainly agree with Scott's view that ads are getting more bang for the buck and becoming more effective, but in addition to being more personal and affecting the consumer more, I think that the ads also give the company highly valuable information about their consumers. Highly effective ads not only engage the consumer more, they also provide the company with info on their customers. Customers can give companies real-time market research about their what they like/dislike and companies who can harness both sides of this will be well positioned for success.
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