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Robert S.K. Regular has over 13 years experience in offline and online media. He is the owner of New York Publishing Group, Inc., the Publisher of Adotas.com. Mr. Regular has also served as President of Active Response Group, a full service display network and lead generation provider. Formerly, Mr. Regular was President of Oridian, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Conducent, Inc. and Media Marketing Director and Producer for television divisions of Clear Channel Communications.

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Pondering Online Advertising’s Low Emotional Quotient

Written on
Mar 10, 2006 
Author
Robert S.K. Regular  |
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Pondering Online Advertising’s Low Emotional Quotient

Online advertising spending is quickly growing to reach over $13 billion in 2006 and will soon surpass radio advertising as it chases the beloved television dollars. In my humble opinion online advertising is growing so rapidly because it’s relevant, has massive reach and is measurable. Unfortunately it lacks one of the most critical values of marketing and advertising which is a high emotional quotient. Can online advertising really reach or surpass the other more emotional mediums like television, radio and print?

Howard Stern recently received a contract with Sirius Radio that has been valued as high as $650 million over the next five years. It’s an extraordinary amount of money for any performer or content provider on any medium, especially radio. To make matters even more astounding his current listening audience is at best 3 million subscribers, but growing. Stern clearly connects with his listeners and has an emotional bond where they loyally follow him, even the FTC is a fan.

The Super Bowl is another vastly popular emotional destination for television viewers that religiously tune in by the millions each year. Super Bowl ads recently reached an all time peak of $2 million per 30 second spot. Each year Super Bowl fever takes over the land and the media hype the humor, emotion and creativity of the advertising. Chances are you will hear water cooler talk the next morning over the ad with the special effects, or the one that made them laugh or think the most.

Cosmopolitan, Vogue, GQ are just a small list of the over 5,000 magazines in this country that people subscribe to. Those famous name brand magazines represent some of the most expensive ad pages ever, in excess of $100k per glossy page. Millions of woman and men take their fashion cues, relationship advice and overall lifestyle experiences from those pages. I’m sure many men and women know how important and the emotional connection those magazines and their glossy pages are to their significant other.

There are many other examples of offline mediums that do not provide direct relevance, mass audiences of over 100 Million, or any true quantifiable measurement. However, they do draw a strong emotional connection to their audience and command huge advertising or promotional dollars to be associated with this connection. Most important they provide a glamorous delivery method of glossy pages, video and audio that appeals to our most important and excitable senses. Plus, new technologies like Tivo, High Definition, and Satellite radio leave an emotional or memorable impact on us and have a greater ability to touch us on a personal level.

Online advertising is special for all the non-emotional reasons I mentioned. Online video is very premature lacking context or emotional placement, but certainly growing and improving, audio is ready for use technically, but has become interruptive and unappreciated without strong context. You don’t exactly appreciate streaming video or audio commercials while you’re reading, researching, searching or just surfing, just seems out of place except in those special places. I really don’t achieve the same emotional value from a commercial playing on CNN.com as I do while I am watching CNN TV. You will note that most web commercials require activation because the assumption is that they are interruptive, this is not a great starting point of appreciation.

I’m really concerned that online advertising, while truly amazing, won’t reach the needed emotional quotient to go to the top level. Even as the futurists predict true integration of video, audio, and web that online advertising for the foreseeable future will remain the workhorse of the advertising mix, the media buy that generates performance and covers for the other more emotional spending. While all those top brand ad buying executives hang out with the fashion magazine people, TV and Radio celebrities and experience their brands connecting with people through the emotional quotient of offline mediums. Sure dollars will begin to flow online and we’ll bask in the glory of the growth, but most of it will come from search on Google, MSN and Yahoo.

With all due respect, and I have the highest respect, they are hardly emotional mediums and will not lead the way in this area. Unless the industry finds a new emotional leader with a higher quotient, I suspect online will be the workhorse of online advertising.





Reader Comments.

I wouldn’t get all emotional about it.

Currently, most advertising companies jump to executions of offline creative for online. I hear “let’s stream this spot online” and “make a banner out of this print creative” every day. The fact is that this is exactly the wrong thing to do. For the same reason you should not put a TV spot in a magazine or a magazine ad on the radio, the internet has grown up now, and it is time to respect it as a new medium rather than force “integrate” creative executions. The internet industry has known this for over 10 years, it is the ad people that are behind on this point. There are a handful of exceptions where some new thinking “outside the rate-card box” is happening. Alas, they are the exception, not the rule.

We are beginning to see some truly revolutionary thinking again online. We are seeing marketing take form in content creation, software development, partnerships, new forms of sponsorship and promotions, interactive fiction, highly addictive games, and customizations for computers in the form of widgets etc.

All this with a sniper rifle accuracy at your target demographic as opposed to the shotgun blast of the network TV viewing audience Not to mention the intrusive nature of TV spots in the world of TV on Demand.

To charge an emotional response is exactly what this medium does best. It is the massive amount of media bucks behind offline “lift” creative forced online that makes the gems a rare find.

I challenge the industry to look a little deeper at the actual medium, before drawing a conclusion on this. A $2.5 million dollar online campaign could, literally build a brand to cult status with Harley Davison like loyalty, or, it can buy you a 30 seconds of television on last year’s super bowl.

If I was the client, I know where I would put my money.

Collin Douma
Art Director (Interactive)
Maclaren McCann
Toronto

Posted by Collin Douma | 11:37 am on March 10, 2006.

Collin makes great points regarding the emotional quotient of online media. My point was that emotion has yet to truly reach online innovation, and repurposing offline media is simply a missed opportunity and in some cases a complete failure. There are many fringe ideas utilizing the online medium to improve marketing. As stated, they are the exception, not the rule.

Emotion can be brought online, but the leaders are far from taking a leadership role here and it’s time to step up.

Thanks for your comments.

Bob

Posted by Robert S.K. Regular | 9:34 am on March 14, 2006.

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