2) Creative experience
Once it is established that you've got quantity or quality of reach, then it comes down to the consumer's experience with your platform. Is it immersive, simple, elegant, valued, experiential, rich, user-friendly and open? Or is it more akin to navigating through an electronic program guide struggling to remember or find where your advertiser's content appears?
Simple, open and elegant graphical user interfaces make or break new platforms. Consider Apple. The elegance and simplicity of the Apple family of iPhone, iPod, iMac, shuffle, etc., demonstrates a level of consumer ease and simplicity through a device platform that even your online platform is competing with. When user experience expectations are set -- even by mobile devices -- yours has to be as simple, or at least on par, with the market standard.
As for the ad units themselves, no level of gimmickry, overlays, intrusions or skinning can compare with creating specifically "for" your platform. If your answer is to simply accept cut-down commercials, re-purposed banners or some mocked-up version of a skin that emulates a brand's equity colors, then you need to ask yourself if you're delivering a real creative experience for your advertiser.
The problem for most online, mobile and emerging platform providers is that the RIGHT creative assets simply DO NOT EXIST. And scaling a creative department to create custom units for every platform simply isn't practical or scalable.
What to do?
Make friends with the creative agency, not just the media folk. If you really want to demonstrate what your platform looks like to a brand marketer, partner with the creative agency to produce mockups that will help you help them look innovative and smart. Can't get their attention? Tell them you are planning to show one of their accounts some mock-ups for your platform and you'd prefer they have a look. You just might end up going in hand in hand with them instead of just the media partner.
Every case is different, but from where I sit, it's all about the work -- not the platform. And if your platform is that compelling, and we can create something engaging together, why not move from the media to the message? Sure, you can go on slugging with re-purposed creative designed for another platform, but chances are, your ad sale might not make it to round two.
3) Measurement
This one is pretty obvious. You simply have to be able to measure your platform. If you're IP-based, you can nanomeasure, provided you've got the backend data. If you're wireless-based, it's a bit tougher, but still infinitely easier than television. Where most emerging media platforms in search of ad dollars fall short is they "invent" their own metrics, instead of cleverly following established ones. This doesn't mean you have to chase impression-based metrics based on 3X effective frequency. What it does mean is that you simply must have some measure of time spent with your platform to make a compelling engagement argument.
All of this coming from a creative director, you might ask? Titles are irrelevant. These days, digital knowledge around distribution, creative and measurement is a mandatory prerequisite to advancing new and emerging media deployments. As a member of the M&MTC (Media & Marketing Technologies Council), each month I sit alongside numerous industry veterans and VCs and examine new and emerging technologies in search of funding based upon proposed ad sponsorship models.
The amazing thing is -- after staffing, developing and beta launching their initiatives -- how few are aware that without these three essential ingredients, you may get funded, but your chances of engaging advertisers are a long tail away.
Alan Schulman is executive creative director of imc2. Read full bio.