A move toward commercials with alternate endings has relevance for online advertising.
Addressable TV Advertising -- those three words could be the beginning of a sea change for the flailing world of the 30-second commercial.
About three years ago, during my stint at TBWA Chiat Day, I wrote a white paper on interactive television (iTV). One company I profiled was called Visible World, and it's probably the only company I've consistently wondered about since then -- specifically, whether or not it was still in business. The answer to that question is "yes," and it seems the company has been finding favor with several visionaries in the marketing circles, most notably Masterfood's Bob DeSena, who, arguably, is leading the charge right now to make marketing relevant, efficient and more accountable.
Visible World, put simply, is a company that has figured out how to merge the worlds of technology and television. Through the power of data and database integration, the company's brains have been able to help match the right message to the right segment of consumer by tagging customized end frames to standardized commercials. In other words, the regular 30 second is now a 25 second with three or four unique and customized 5-second endings.
The ability to dynamically serve up these varied alternatives enables advertisers to match offers to households based on their clustered demographics -- from income to location to the presence of children, for example. Back when I wrote the white paper, I also noted Visible World's ability to determine even who in a household was watching TV at any given point in time, based on the way they used the remote control (in other words, the channels they visited during commercial breaks).
So why should you care?
For starters, it becomes pretty obvious that what is starting to happen to television advertising is not that dissimilar from the world we've become quite accustomed to (more on that shortly). Secondly, this trend is the realization of a predication that several folks, most notably Starcom IP's president, Rishad Tobaccowala, have spoken about pretty emphatically -- the shift of television advertising to an IP-led world.
It also presents several challenges to a world that we often refer to as "traditional" -- those that keep with tradition and thus, do not readily embrace change. One group leading this backlash has been the agency creative community, who has resisted the imminent and inevitable move from a one-size-fits-all to a grid-based matrix approach. The reasons given are numerous -- starting from the concern about creating three to four versions of the same spot and what this might mean to the overall creative product in the process.
I find this extraordinary, and yet hardly surprising. On one level, I would think that the ability to do anything to inject life back into the decrepit television commercial would be welcomed; however, on another level, this does make the art of storytelling that much more complex and challenging by cutting the allocated time by 5 to 10 seconds.
Furthermore, the implications of addressable advertising certainly allude to a hybrid type of spot that takes on some DRTV-like characteristics, combined with the lavish shoots in remote destinations such as Cape Town, South Africa. In other words, not as sexy!
The other skepticism raised has been the familiar one of limited reach or penetration. This was once the story of the internet (although I would imagine that has changed with this week's announcement by Nielsen//NetRatings that internet household adoption has now reached 75 percent of American homes) and it certainly has a very TiVo-like flavor to it.
This being said, the marketers that get it will no doubt push their agencies to innovate or else. Conversely, there is a defined role for the agency to play in bringing this kind of new marketing approach to their clients and making sure they give it the kind of consideration it deserves.
As mentioned earlier, the opportunity presented through addressable TV advertising is nothing new to us. In fact, I'm sure words like optimization, ROI, ad serving, reconciliation and the process of creating five different versions of the same concept, are top of your minds right now.
In a recent test, for example, 1-800-FLOWERS saw twice as many orders placed through addressable TV ads when it ran three different versions, corresponding to three tiers of income (below, average, above) in a controlled market.
Isn't it ironic that many of our pains and trials by fire could very well prove to be our ace of spades?
To this end, people like Adam Gerber are ideally positioned, representing the best of both worlds. He is a bridge between the world of old and new and he is the Babel Fish which will help unite the two disparate spheres.
Personally, I look forward to companies like Tacoda and DoubleClick getting more involved in the television space as it seems logical to me that -- ala last week's Juice -- the content will disseminate and promulgate itself across multiple distribution touch points, with the common thread being technology and the common objective inevitably being ROI.