Written by I’m glad that I live in a world with advertising. It funds almost all media I consume with the exception of music and movies. There is no way that we would be able to afford to consume such an array of content on the internet and television without the support of advertising. Further, advertising connects businesses with the public thereby making the economy go round.
However, advertising has a lot of enemies. People insult it all the time. “I hate this commercial,” “This pop up is so annoying,” and “This site looks so trashy with all of these belly fat and teeth whitening banners.” These are all valid concerns that advertising technology hopes to appease by delivering a higher degree of (1) ad relevancy and (2) ad/content integration.
Relevancy
Hulu.com has developed a great method of seeking greater relevancy:
By allowing the viewer to decide whether or not the ad is relevant is a surprisingly innovative way of accomplishing relevancy. A lot of ad tech tries to target ads to consumers by algorithmically predicting their interests and behaviors. But people are fickle and unpredictable, and maybe Hulu is onto something with this simple and elegant model. And it politely requests the viewer to think twice about the ad and interact with it which seems like a much more valuable ad space than an ad on television.
Further, new types of media like Twitter and Facebook open a lot of possibilities for superior ad relevancy. Never before have people been revealing so much information about themselves “publicly,” which–in theory at least–dramatically increases the odds of advertisers delivering consumers relevant advertising.
Integration
A pop up would be an example of an ad with terrible content integration. A few emerging advertising technologies which I believe accomplish a greater degree of ad/content integration include Vibrant and Image Space Media.
Vibrant (and a few other companies) serves in text advertising:
When you scroll over a word of interest, an ad will pop up relevant to that word. I agree that this can be a little annoying if you aren’t expecting it. But now that I am used to seeing these ads around the web, I only scroll over terms that interest me. Like Hulu’s model, I think this is a pretty elegant way of allowing the reader to choose the type of ads he or she would like to see.
Image Space Media has a similar technology that it applies to images:
When you scroll over an image of interest, you will see an ad relevant to the image. I think this is awesome technology because it doesn’t cover up any text and because images seem like they would draw greater interest than text. The only problem with this technology is that it seems to cause pages to load slower (most online display advertising does this to some degree).
In Conclusion
Much of ad spend on traditional media goes to waste. Most commercials we see on TV are totally irrelevant to us. And oftentimes we change the channel when commercials come on because they have terrible integration with content. Greater degrees of relevancy and ad/content integration means a better experience for media consumers. What it means for the advertising industry is more valuable advertising space. With annual US ad spend of at least $100 Billion, we are talking about a huge opportunity for advertising technologists.
All this sounds great–but the truth of the matter is, I hardly ever click on any ad that’s presented to me–no matter how relevant it is. This is because the timing of the ads sucks, and because I know if I click on something, I’ll never hear the end of it. If an ad pops up when I’m about to watch a show on Hulu, I’m not going to click on it–I’m going to watch the show instead. Or if I’m on Facebook, it’s unlikely I’ll click on something because then I’ll get ads about that same things for a long time afterward. It’s rare that ads actually compel me to click on them. I think timing needs to improve, not just content relevance and integration.
Thanks for reading and commenting Jordan.
Most people are exactly like you; they don’t click on ads, interact with them, or study them intently. That’s why the performance of online ad campaigns these days is judged less and less by CTR (click through rate); it was far more important in the earlier days of online advertising.
The industry is finding that display ads serve more similarly to billboards. If Coca Cola buys some online display ad space, they might not care if you click because you would never buy a can of Coke over the internet. But hopefully Coke gets more ad spend for their buck because that ad is only delivered to relevant consumers. In the case of a billboard or TV commercial, those ads will be viewed by thousands of people outside of Coke’s target market–basically a waste of their intended as spend.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean about timing, but it sounds like it would fit into the necessity for better integration. If an ad comes up at the wrong time, my argument is that it’s integration with content is bad. Ad tech needs to find a better time to display the ad within the content for people like you.
And you must not have used Hulu lately, but you are forced to let the ads play. They don’t require you to click through to the brand, they simply ask you whether or not the ad is relevant. It’s just like a TV commercial that lets the viewer choose which ad they would like to see.
In summary, click throughs should not be a significant judge of ad campaign performance for the reasons you stated. More and more companies are realizing this. But I would be willing to bet that better relevancy of ads on the media you consume would create more influence over you than less relevancy. And you will be less likely to get mad at a brand if their ads are integrated well with the content. Both of these are more likely to occur with internet technologies than traditional media and advertising.
Caught your comment on Mark Suster’s blog … I look forward to keeping up with you.
Monetization is all about supporting the payer. One cannot charge memberships for consumers and then insult them by ambushing their experience by inserting ads inline to support the advertiser.
Advertisers want first to be noticed, and then to be desired. Actually, they don’t care about either if they are selling more stuff to current and new customers.
Let’s just turn advertising information into general content, and organize it in such a way that consumers will hang out where that content is displayed.
60 years ago the publishing world discovered the value of advertising as news. PM, the advertising free afternoon NY paper, quickly hear their readers asking, Where’re the ads? So they wrote news stories about the ads in competing newspapers. Problem solved. Profits discovered.
Enterprise news in such a service, supported by consumer memberships, would be relatively straight forward, and could be limited to ‘enterprise member news’ … so in the end, all revenue is subscription revenue.
I realize this is perhaps more integrated that you were planning.
GumGum (www.gumgum.com) is the clear leader in this space. I tried ISM on select, high-traffic sections of my websites and payouts were horrible.