At last week's CTAM Annual Summit, there was an enormous hush that came over the crowd of hundreds from the cable marketing industry when MySpace CMO Shawn Gold revealed the impact of their 100-plus million and growing subscriber experience.
From time spent online by MySpace subs versus television at virtually every demographic level, you could feel an undertone of fear among programmers that something very dramatic was happening on those broadband pipes that the Multiple Service Operators (MSOs) are providing-- more eyeballs are leaving.
Follow that closely with last week's stunning news of Google's continued growth and revenue performance and one thing becomes very clear: This stuff is moving fast.
As a CCO with a creative department of 20-somethings highly in tune with these new dynamics, the call for new kinds of ad units and experiences couldn't be louder. The sheer velocity of new experiences and enhancements being introduced online -- including everything from del.icio.us to YouTube to Windows Live -- suggests that as an industry we've got to break out of the confines of the HTML publishing grid that got us here and start crafting new kinds of messaging for our marketers.
A scan through a dozen MySpace sites indicates that perhaps the bright minds at News Corp. got the business strategy right, but haven't yet arrived at the most elegant ad solutions. Lots of old school banner units (which are frankly more discouraging than encouraging) populate the myriad of personal web pages on MySpace and, according to the 20-somethings in our studio, are destined to drive users onto the next big thing if MySpace can't get to more innovative adjacencies and contextual serving.
My gut tells me they don't have a lot of time given the exodus we saw from sites like Friendster.
Meanwhile, Google continues to innovate along both their AdSense and AdWords offerings. While they have the long tail of advertisers nicely served, the trick will be how to enhance creative offerings so national brands can present themselves beyond text where their brand essence can come through. This is an exciting and worthy challenge; if I know Google, they will get there-- fast!
The challenge for us as interactive creatives is to start looking beyond enhanced banners and pre-rolls and start developing new ad experiences, dashboards, widgets and advergames that can live adjacent to these environments and become more encouraging to viewers. As much as the ad models for these new experiences are challenging traditional media planning and buying services, so too do we as a creative community need to move quickly to keep up with the velocity of change that's presenting us with new environments and experiences within which to serve every week.
Building cool contextual messages that live within or adjacent to personalized content or search results isn't rocket science. We just have to get past the traditional penchant for serving the same stuff we have been for years. Evolving our creative from banners to rich media to broadband video has still been a challenge for the interactive industry to standardize-- and we haven't got that right yet.
But there's more waiting on the horizon that's already here... and given the sheer velocity of innovation that's coming at us every week, we have to stop being reactive and get in front of our marketers with work for these new environments that makes them uncomfortable-- because that's what great creative should do.
Is the velocity of change a problem or opportunity? It depends on your state of mind.
From where I sit, bring it on. These are exciting times and stuff is moving fast.
My advice: Set your alarm for another wake-up call. There is much to do.
Alan Schulman is Chief Creative Officer for Brand New World. Read full bio.
