Brands - Instant Karma versus The Long and Winding Road

On Oct 25th we had a great discussion at the Convergence Conversations, at Intellect, on Advertising in a Converged World. A number of themes came out, indicative of the number of opposing forces at play in the industry.

One of the many dichotomies that the convergent world foists on the advertising universe is the fault-line between instant gratification and the longer lasting image and association creation.

As I write this, Google have announced that their UK advertising for the 3^rd quarter of 2007 has just crossed £ 327 million, which puts their noses just ahead of ITV1, with £ 317 million. The 2 brands are expected to finish neck and neck at around £ 1.25 to 1.3 billion. While crossing ITV1 may be a major landmark for Google, it’s just another milestone for the success of search engine advertising. At last count search engine ads in the UK were worth £ 762 million out of the half-yearly total of £ 1.3 billion, or roughly 58%. Clearly Google gobbles up the lions share of this.

Moreover, the explosive and ongoing rocketing growth of online advertising tells it’s own story – in the UK, over 10% of the advertising is online. And of course the online market is growing much faster than other platforms.

All of this means marketers are liking online, within this, they’re loving search based advertising and even within that, they’re infatuated with Google. Why?

Well for 1, in solving the problem best articulated by John Wannamaker, going online allows you to see which half (or third or fourth) of your advertising budget is wasted. And in fact often ensures that it’s not. As a highly measurable medium bestowed by models which allow marketers to pay for results, gives marketers an easy yardstick to measure their success against.

Second, the online space allows you to take a step towards the nirvana of contextual advertising. Rather than assume that everybody watching Sex And The City on TV must be women in their 20s and 30s, you might wait till people actually search for something relevant. As long as somebody searches for Skin Care, you might slip in your moisturizer ad.

Third and critically, the online space allows users to actually do something about an advertisement if they like the product or are interested in it. In essence it allows viewers to go from exposure to initiating the sales process. It rushes you through the interest and desire phases and shoots you straight from awareness to action. By thus telescoping the AIDA, it provides instant gratification to both the consumer and the marketer (who can now quantify returns instantly), from the numbers generated.

But of course that’s not the only objective advertisers seek to drive. For a huge number of brand owners, there’s an attempt to create an imprint of a brand in the consumers mind – an image, associations, a pedigree, long before there’s actually a need or a decision to buy. Lifestyle goods often fall into this category – as my friend Shekhar points out, people know about and covet brnds like Porsche long before they are actually in a position to buy one. And there is a real danger that in the bustle of instant gratification provided by online media, this longer, as critical, but less measurable objective of Brand Value Creation will get lost.

Of course, it can be argued that as broadband speeds allow video advertising over the internet, our ability to storytell and recreate that touchy-feely, hard-to-measure aspect of brands will get delivered, as in the excellent Dove campaigns. Or that as Televison gets cleverer, and becomes more interactive and measurable, it will recapture some of the digital spends while not losing its core proposition of being an emotive medium. IPTV is one of the reasons why this can be realized.

What’s truly important that brand owners don’t get caught up in the feeding frenzy that is online advertising and forget that there are other reasons to advertise. Or they manage to combine both effectively. But one way or another they retain the softer, more lasting, mythic and emotive value of the brands. The danger with instant gratification is that it often trades away this future value, and  recapturing this while retaining the ability to get actionability and measurability may be the real challenge of the convergence era.