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 3rd 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
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.
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