“You could make a case that the interesting stuff the internet’s going to do to the media industry has mostly already happened.”
So says thought guru, columnist, and creative director at GDS Russell Davies. That’s not to say, as he goes on to say that you can just sit and think: “phew, we survived. Because the internet will now just move on to transform every other bit of your business and could easily render you useless as a side effect.”
I won’t argue with Russell. The last time I attempted to he conclusively proved that we were both right! I tend to shy away from predictions anyway as I’m not much of a gambler. Whether the neophiliacs are going to have to take a chill pill for a while or not I don’t know. I do know that we have barely begun to feel the impact of the change brought by the internet. We have barely scratched the surface.
I am grateful to the BBC’s director of future media Ralph Rivera for his way of explaining this. He described what he named the Brooklyn Grid (his place of origin). The vertical axis of the grid is “New Stuff” versus “Same Stuff”. The horizontal axis: “New ways” and “Same Ways”.
Describing developments so far at the BBC he explained that mostly their innovation to date had been “Same Stuff” done in “New Ways” eg the iplayer (in the sense that it is the same sort of content that the BBC has always produced delivered in a new way) or the Olympics (coverage of events, but all of them, simultaneously). His ambition was to start to populate the New Stuff in New Ways part of the grid at the BBC.
Similarly in advertising, lots of what advertising agencies do is the Same Stuff in the Same Ways still in terms of bulk of spend. There’s an increasing amount of the Same Stuff/New Ways – for instance video on demand. I want to put Search into that space too as it is a new way of delivering the Yellow Pages in a fashion with cost per click reviving the shared risk model of buying that was how we often worked in the early days even on TV. There is going to be much more of a return to this shared risk across campaigns generally. Let’s not worry about New Stuff in Same Ways – every new ad campaign that has a traditional media plan goes in that box. But we have barely scratched the surface of New Stuff in New Ways yet. Integrating the second screen into truly delivering point of sale while ads are rolling on TV, using mobile as a first screen when the target audience requires it, beginning with owned content rather than bought and fully plumbing the whole connected system of media are all still in their early days in terms of scale.
That’s really going to shake things up once we get to grips with it. I hope no-one relaxed when they read Russell’s piece. There’s a lot more change ahead.
Up close and personal, in more ways than one.
Monday, March 31st, 2014In a dark hallway, I mean with no lights at all, waiting to go on stage at the IAB conference on RTA, I found myself being fitted for a mike in close proximity to Financial Times Commercial Director, Digital Advertising , Jon Slade. He charmingly turned his back while my mike cord was threaded through my clothes, after all we had only just met, and the FT is a publication for gentlemen.
We were assembling for the Viewability Debate at this year’s Real Time Advertising get together. The sub title “Make the most of it” said it all. A change, a revolution in media thinking is upon us. Not everyone yet is exploiting the real possibilities of getting really up close and personal with your prospective customer that it offers.
Caroline Kinsman from Waitrose.com does seem to be doing so. Her case study sounded a great example of applying traditional DR test and learn principles across the whole life cycle of attracting and keeping customers. She described a programme that included reach based offline media to prospect for customers, synchronised on line messages to exploit second screen and retargeting with relevant copy for those who shopped once, and those who didn’t sign up.
This use of media specifically to get close and personal with the customer was something that was once only a theory delivered in abstract. John Grant predicted the trend in his fine book “The new marketing manifesto” as long ago as 2000. The examples he gave were ideas. They were concepts. The reality now is that RTA gives us breathtaking opportunities to deliver those ideas.
What of Viewability, the debate that I was part of the panel of ?
I think many in the audience were shocked by the facts that emerged on this issue. I’ll sum up with a comment from MediaCom’s head of digital investment Tim Lawrence : “Viewability is a really hot topic at present in digital – the ability to track whether an online ad is being viewed by the user on screen is now available- and if you hear that only ‘30% of online ads are seen’ and that you shouldn’t pay for anything that isn’t viewed then you can understand the push for a greater emphasis.”
One of the issues involved is simply someone not seeing an online ad because it’s below the “fold” or minimised. In this the medium is suffering from no greater a problem than traditional media. I suggested to the FT that Viewability standards proposed by the IAB could make the ads online have better viewability standards than the paper edition has where audience measurement is according to the NRS standard, surely a great advantage for the medium as far as accountability is concerned.
The standard proposed by the IAB is that a view is 50% of the ad seen for at least 1 second. Whilst progress this does seem rather light and more importantly doesn’t match the standard set for a viewer by BARB (3 seconds). It is a pity that once again the industry is missing an opportunity to set comparable audience standards between media.
It will however help the situation and can be used as a brief for creative work (get the logo and strap line in early (the creative agency will truly love that!)).
The more worrying aspect of Viewability is fraud. Around 13% of views are not human according to this report from AdSafe.
And the bots that view the ads also click through to make a mockery of pay per click.
This is not and should not be seen as the Wild West and sellers of views online must shun the practices of snake oil salesmen even if there is short term uplift from soft standards of course. RTA offers unprecedented opportunities for reaching prospects up close and personal. The more stringent and more rigorous the audience metrics are, the better for the fortunes of the industry.
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