It's Not Inventory That's The Problem For Online Ads; It's Getting People's Attention
from the it's-about-time! dept
For many years we've been banging the drum about how advertisers need to realize that advertising is content. As there were more and more complaints about people skipping ads or figuring out ways to avoid advertising, the solution was simply to recognize that if the ads were good content you no longer had to worry about intrusive advertising (which works less and less, as the idea of the captive audience goes away). Earlier this week, we wrote about how we were worried that too many TV commercial advertisers seemed to think that simply throwing their commercials at the beginning of YouTube videos was going to be the solution to the "TiVo problem." That's not going to work, because that's not how people want to be advertised to.In that post, I mentioned that some have clearly figured this out, and linked back to a post from 2004 about American Express understanding the nature of ads being content for a campaign they ran online that really encouraged people to seek them out. The good news is that those older campaigns were so successful that the company has embraced the model much more fully, even using the same language we have about how ads are content, and how they need to be more interactive and engaging. Meanwhile, Forbes is running a series of articles on online videos as well, with multiple articles noting how American Express is using YouTube to get people to want to view their ads, and (similar to Frito-Lay) getting people to actually make their own ads as well. Forbes even has an article from an ad exec about the importance of ads being good, engaging content as well. While it could have come a bit earlier on in the evolution of advertising, it's really great to see it working in practice -- though, we're sure there will still be some who complain about how advertising is dead due to things like TiVo. In the first Forbes article above, by the way, it's also worth pointing out that the company notes that forcing ads before the videos is a pretty sure path to losing their audience. So, as we had suggested in the piece earlier this week, advertisers expecting YouTube to put their ads on other's videos are barking up the wrong tree. Instead, they should look at simply making it so people want to see their videos, and then putting them wherever it makes sense (including just uploading them to YouTube)... just like American Express has done. It's not about buying airtime, or "finding inventory." The inventory is all there. There's no limit to inventory online. The only limit is getting people to pay attention.
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Firefox factor?
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Even more true beyond "image" advertising
When you get to the level of price/item ads -- think periodical retail ads or newspaper/online classified ads -- the "ads-as-content" value proposition is even easier to achieve. People want to know that things they want to buy are on sale, and how and where to get them.
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Wants
Ads as content won't work, simply because only a handful will go viral at any point in time. Most won't be sought out at all, because most won't--and can't--be "compelling".
Ask practically anyone, and you'll find they don't want ads. Of course, quite a few don't want to pay for their content either, so there's a definite sense of people wanting their cake and eating it too.
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Re: Wants
Ads as content won't work
But they do work
simply because only a handful will go viral at any point in time
Who said they need to go viral? They don't . They just need to be made so that the people who need what they want seek them out. That's different than viral.
Ask practically anyone, and you'll find they don't want ads.
That's because you position them as ads. People don't mind compelling content, even if it advertises for something else. You come here to Techdirt, even though it "advertises" for our corporate service. Do you think of Techdirt as a big advertisement? No, it's content you're interested in reading.
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Ads as content
By treating ads as content you broaden the horizon of what is possible with regards to who you can make an impact with as an advertiser. At least it seems that way to me. So in that context alone, ads as content makes a lot of sense for advertisers.
With regards to people who don't want to be advertised to, that's a tall order since just about every media I can think of either has ads alongside it, or integrated with it (paid placement). Kind of hard to dispense with a form of business that subsidizes our insatiable appetite for media.
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Honeymoon is OVER
Nobody pays attention to commercials on TV, even if you are a "captive audience".
The smart advertisers will see this as an opportunity, I think.
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Ads
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