Hey, publishers: How can we sell emotional experiences in just 15K?

As an entertainment/lifestyle brand marketer working within the online medium, I’m given a tremendous amount of responsibility with our clients’ assets. These assets range from high-resolution photography of actors to stereo-quality audio clips and TV-quality trailers and spots. It is up to us to make sure that not only are our media plans reaching audiences at the right time with the right message, but that the creative is helping them make their decision.

The entertainment marketplace is more crowded now than it ever has been. Consumers have more choices than ever. The challenge is always, "How do we make our client's product stand out from the pack? How do we turn their brand into the must-see, must-hear, must-play event that it needs to be?"'

The short answer is to use the strongest, most attractive assets in creative and impactful ways (combined with the right messaging, of course) to strike an emotional chord with target audiences. But to make matters more challenging, what we’re selling often requires audiences to actually leave their comfy ergonomic desks and perform an offline action. One can argue that we’re not only marketing a product -- we’re marketing an experience.

So my question to online publishers is: “How can I sell an ‘emotional experience’ in a 15k ad?”

Technology is a wonderful thing. Macromedia’s Flash has enabled us to turn clunky animated gifs into fluidly-animated representations of our brands and products. We can even use it to display TV-quality video. The influx of rich media vendors into the marketplace has paved the way for great innovations in advertising technology -- yet oftentimes, we still are struggling to develop high-quality creative units that must fit publishers’ file size requirements that are so small (12-15k) it is virtually impossible to avoid harming the quality of the very assets we are tasked with selling to audiences.

As broadband maintains its strong presence in U.S. households (43 percent of PC users, or 51 million individuals according to Nielsen/NetRatings), all major publishers must be nimble and savvy enough to build relationships with rich media vendors (or develop the technology themselves). They will have to in order to effectively service the needs of advertisers -- or they will risk losing out to those publishers that do.

A recent survey by DoubleClick found rich media generates substantially greater brand recognition and higher sales than traditional ad units.

Recently Yahoo! announced it is working with Eyeblaster to launch 100k-capable ‘polite’ banner ads throughout the site. This is a great step in the right direction. I encourage other publishers to, er… take inventory of their inventory, and do whatever they can to make sure they are not far behind in giving advertisers -- and consumers -- the experiences they deserve.

Ian Schafer is founder of Deep Focus, the award-winning entertainment marketing and promotions company that recently won another award for its work on Miramax's 'KILL BILL Vol. 1' campaign.