Media'ZBiz!

What will the future of advertising look like?

The answer could be the one painted in this viral ad promoting the upcoming FITC digital and technology festival in Toronto. The ad is set in the future and shows a narrator in a deserted office (preserved as a museum) describing the remains of the last advertising agency on earth. An ad agency which ignored the power of digital and social media.

dddddd

Traditional advertising no longer works. The gap (and break up) between the consumer and the advertiser is growing on a daily basis as shown in this great video.

Eric Clemons a year ago has written in TechCrunch Why the Advertising is Failing Over the Internet. Here is an extract of what he wrote:

There are three problems with advertising in any form, whether broadcast or online:

• Consumers do not trust advertising. Dan Ariely has demonstrated that messages attributed to a commercial source have much lower credibility and much lower impact on the perception of product quality than the same message attributed to a rating service. Forrester Research has completed studies that show that advertising and company sponsored blogs are the least-trusted source of information on products and services, while recommendations from friends and online reviews from customers are the highest.

• Consumers do not want to view advertising. Think of watching network TV news and remember that the commercials on all the major networks are as closely synchronized as possible.  Why?  If network executives believed we all wanted to see the ads they would be staggered, so that users could channel surf to view the ads; ads are synchronized so that users cannot channel surf to avoid the ads.

• And mostly consumers do not need advertising. My own research suggests that consumers behave as if they get much of their information about product offerings from the internet, through independent professional rating sites like dpreview.com or community content rating services like Ratebeer.com or TripAdvisor.

It is time for media owners to innovate – ditch advertising and become a platform.

Your thoughts and comments are welcome.

Screen Digest pointed out that the ad load (number of ads shown per programme) on web VoD services is approaching broadcast levels.
‘VOD on cable TV is an opt-in medium and that means viewers are engaged’ says Daisy Whitney in her New Media Minute video report:

Simon McGrath, CMO of SeaChange International has said the following in February:

Relevance is the key to success here, as in so many other areas of marketing. It’s possible for marketers to place ads in context for a viewer by mining viewing information available from operators using advanced VOD advertising platforms to source the right ads for the right viewer, down to zip codes. Content owners – the networks and cable operators – have opportunities to work more closely with media buying agencies and their advertising clients to reach audiences on what is arguably the best screen in the house, the TV. VOD ad platforms support a variety of ad formats, from traditional embedded ad spots to ad overlays, bookends and even long-form, on-demand ’showcase’ ads that deliver information and some degree of interaction. And it won’t be long before an AdWords-type clickable link can take the viewer from a traditional ad to a showcase spot that delivers deep information about a product the viewer is really interested in.

But wait – don’t time-shifting viewers skip the ads?

Reports vary widely on the percentage of viewers who use their DVRs to skip ads. The good news here for marketers, according to Capgemini’s 2008 report on addressable advertising, is that many viewers who watch VOD appear to be willing to watch ads inserted into VOD programming (76% prefer to watch ad-supported content as opposed to 23% who prefer to watch paid content).

VoD will most probably shake up the TV ad market, but will ultimately lead to a better viewing experience and a highly targeted, accountable medium for advertisers. The advanced targeting methods and interactivity used around VoD on the web cannot be ignored by broadcasters or advertisers and will set the standards as VoD becomes more prevalent in our living rooms.