Interactive marketing is an increasingly vital element to almost any advertising campaign, so it's best to start acclimating yourself with some of the incredible new branding opportunities out there.
It's pretty mind-blowing when you consider that 10 years ago most people didn't even have email. Mobile phones were just starting to trickle down to the mainstream (and weigh less than a barbell). The highest speed internet you could get on your home computer was from a 14.4 baud modem. It's a wonder how we got anything done.
Nowadays, of course, it's a completely different story. Broadband has surged, television is streaming to cell phones and TiVo has become the new Xerox or Kleenex (brand names that are synonymous with a generic consumer product). Computers are an integral component of the 21st century entertainment experience, where user-generated content is proving as popular -- if not more so -- than television programming. New living room devices appear almost every day that further blur the lines between television and the internet.
Naturally this simultaneously presents tremendous opportunities and massive hurdles for advertising models. New content requires new ad formats and new ways of thinking in order to reach an audience, and there has been a lot of thinking over the past decade as advertisers tried to comprehend and leverage what the fast growing online audience could offer them. As consumer interactivity and demographic hyper-targeting became a reality, banner ads gave way to animated web-spots, and pop-ups and pop-unders became so prevalent -- and so obnoxious -- that they spawned a whole cottage industry designed to eliminate them. Once ad serving technology advanced and internet speeds got fast enough to handle video, advertisers were able to take a sigh of relief and said, "Now we can run the same 30-second clips we run on TV!"
It was a good idea at the time. The 30-second spot had been the advertising standard for decades. But just as no one could predict that voyeuristic amateur videos made by lonely coeds and insane skateboarders would become Must See (Not Quite) TV, or that actual Must See TV would be watched on computers and downloaded to iPods, no one necessarily saw the writing on the wall for the traditional 30-second spot when it came to the internet.
This is not to say the 30-second spot is dead by any means. But confidence in it is eroding, and not just online. The age of TiVo has had a significant impact on ad effectiveness, much like VCRs did when they were introduced, hence the proliferation of watermarks, overlays and in-screen promotions that run parallel to TV shows.
But being online presents different challenges to advertisers for the same reason that makes it so alluring: interactivity. Similar to television commercials, online video ads typically run as "pre-rolls" before the content the user actually wants to watch. But unlike television, we have the ability to track user behavior online, in real time, to help us measure how effective (or not) our advertising is.
And what advertisers and content producers have been finding out is that viewers find 30-second pre-rolls to be incredibly annoying. So much so that if they can't find a way to immediately skip over the spot, nearly three out of four users simply abandon the content all together. It's a lose-lose scenario that's forcing a lot of companies to rethink the internet and find new ways to market to consumers without irritating them, but still fetching high prices from advertisers. We talked to a few of them to get a flavor for effective alternatives to the 30-second clip.