iMedia: Where is the money being spent these days in interactive? Is it more of an integrated approach?
Gleeson: Oh f... no, it's not integrated! I gave an interactive credentials presentation recently -- this will sound mean -- but I basically broke down my audience into three groups. One group was the folks who get it, the folks you could sit down with, who recognize that their ships are afloat in a pretty choppy sea right now, and who know that we're probably still in the trinket phase of interactive as opposed to being anywhere near maturity. That's a very small group of people, and they're the ones who when you start engaging with them during the presentation, the entire rest of the room shuts out, tunes out, and wishes you were dead. So there's that danger zone of whether to engage the people that get it and risk shutting off the rest of the room, or ignoring them and risk looking like you don't get it.
The second pool is a group of people who recognize that their annual review will include what they've done from an innovation standpoint, and so they're looking for the least expensive way to check that box, or they're hoping you will just explain to them what the gross rating point equivalency of all this interactive stuff is so you can shut the f... up and get out of the room. And then there's the third group of people who came for the lunch, and it seemed like a really good idea until the door closed and they realized they couldn't get out, and that their really nasty bowl of pesto pasta was just going to be rotting for the rest of the afternoon.
I don't think there's a silver bullet at which point massive amounts of TV money will shift into interactive... Interactive as a percentage of overall spend is still not that high, right? There are some brands that have pushed. I've seen budgets of 25 percent and even higher on some brands, but at some point, that's all looking at media bought... it's talking about media spend. But the tough thing about interactive is that social media and apps don't get captured on a media spend. MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, and Hi5 are desperately trying to figure out how to monetize their models, but they're being asked to figure out how to do that by backing it into the old loading dock of "Oh it's banners and blah, blah, blah," and I just think it's wrong.
iMedia: How do you stay innovative in this economy, and how do you convince clients to take risks?
Gleeson: The reality is that pitching the idea is only half the battle. Because even if you get a client who thinks the idea is brilliant, then you have to go through the 50 other people who could say no at the organization, who weren't at the original presentation, and who fall more toward those second two categories outside of the room.
That's where stuff gets really hard, especially if you've got folks who still look at this as another distribution channel for ads, and so they're looking for eyeballs, not ideas. Or if you have folks who are looking at this as an experiment and therefore aren't interested in engagement content. Then you start to run into trouble. We're all wrestling with this one. I've got a theory. I'm going to try this out this year, actually. I don't want to do another interactive credentials presentation that I don't do with the client. I think there's something to be said for having the folks in your organization who "get it" co-presenting with you to their own organization. I don't know whether we can do it, but I think that will change some of the tenor.
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