When we look back I believe that we will see 2009 as the year when the interactive grew up and stopped being the new kid of the advertising world.
- This year the Grand Prix at Cannes went to an online film not a TV ad - Tribal and Philips’ “Carousel” (1)
- A few years ago creative people in agencies only wanted to do TV. Nowadays online is sexy. There are now many examples of great online films and interactive advertising.
- Online advertising nowadays takes a significant share of many clients’ budgets. Worldwide it is approaching 10% of total spends (2).
- There are several agencies including Razorfish and Sapient with approaching $200 million in revenue in the U.S. alone. (3) Crispen Porter has redefined what being an advertising agency means in the new world, and it often doesn’t include traditional media.
However with this new status needs to come a new maturity.
Stop claiming your new campaign will go viral. Realistically only a handful of campaigns worldwide create real buzz. Making empty promises like this is dishonest and will come back to bite us. We’ve learnt from traditional advertising that while it’s nice to have famous advertising, an ad doesn’t need to be famous to work. (4). But the online world has not really how do we use this knowledge. And the answer is not finding more ways to make my online experience painful by sticking ads on top of what I really want to look at.
We should ban the use of the terms “social media” and “marketing 2.0” (I’ve even recently been hearing marketing 3.0). It disguises lazy thinking and usually means “let’s do something cool on the web”. We rarely mean a true dialogue.
Nor should we claim online will replace TV. Radio didn’t replace print, and TV didn’t replace radio. Each has its own strengths and each has its role to play in a total communications plan.
We need to get more sophisticated in assessing effectiveness. A great advantage for online is that it is measurable. We can measure click throughs, eyeballs, and subsequent behaviour. But success is not just responses. What we are often trying to do is build a brand – to influence how people see us and feel about us. Until online takes this more seriously it will continue to be seen as just a response based medium.
All this means the specialist interactive agencies need to look out. The things I’ve talked about are the areas where traditional advertising agencies are strong. And trust me, they are all investing massively to get their share of interactive business. It used to be easy to say that the big agencies didn’t get it (5). Watch out guys, clients want their on and off line activity to work seamlessly to both sell and build the brand. Specialist agencies are starting to look less attractive, especially if they keep the “we’re the cool kids” attitude and don’t adapt to this new maturity.
The next few years will be fascinating as we grapple with how to do online advertising day in day out and not just as something sexy.
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0S7bEsTM60
2. http://www.zenithoptimedia.com/gff/pdf/Advertising%20Expenditure%20Forecasts%20%20March%202007.pdf
3. http://adage.com/datacenter/datapopup.php?article_id=108866
4. http://www.accountplanning.net/Central/InTheirOwnWords/LowInvolvementProcessing
5. http://blog.schematic.com.au/?p=93
