TV Advertising’s Future: A Long Paddle Upstream
ADOTAS EXCLUSIVE — Any time an innovative advertiser, technology company or programmer announces a new interactive TV initiative, our trade press gets giddy. If it doesn’t breathlessly proclaim that “the future of advertising is here,” it chronicles the campaign’s plans in rich detail. There are four reasons that drive this enthusiasm: 1) From the first automobiles, radios, TVs and rocket ships, Americans embrace any technologies that offer new possibilities;
2) Money talks. When Microsoft paid an estimated 200-300 million to acquire Navic Networks and its interactive ad platform, it underscored that even moguls believe that interactive TV ads are a pot of gold at the end of the test signal;
3) Advertising formats are media topics, and you can always count on the mainstream media to fill column inches about itself.
4) Interactive television advertising actually is the future of advertising. Engage-ability, target-ability, controllability and accountability are no itty promises. Interactive TV ads can deliver on them all.
Engagement. The Pepsi spots that DISH Network recently aired during MTV’s Video Music Awards allowed viewers to answer questions and cast votes with their satellite remotes. Younger viewers of The N’s Queen Bees series enjoyed similar opportunities that Cadbury sponsored. You want viewers to stick around for your ads? Give them something interesting to do while they watch.
Targeting. The MTV generation guzzles soft drinks. The N generation consumes candy. Directing interactive commercials to such broad demographics is merely the opening salvo. As TV providers learn to make better use of granular viewer data that set-top boxes collect, targeting will become more precise as it becomes more behavioral.
Control. Most advertisers grudgingly accept that consumers have wrestled away control of marketing message consumption. Interactive TV ads enable the desired dialog: advertisers present options, then viewers choose whether to act. No one can complain of offero interruptus if they purposely click overlays to watch expanded ads.
Accountability. In direct response television, the best way to measure ad performance is to tally phone calls, mouse clicks and the sales that they generate. We can now add “remote clicks” to the list. When interactive TV ads take the biggest step forward and implement “click to buy” functionality, the return on investment will be utterly transparent.
Cable companies are so committed to an interactive future that six of them joined forces this year to form the oddly named Project Canoe. You’d think that people with ties to an ad world that dreams up market segment acronyms like DINKWADs (Double Income, No Kids, With A Dog), could have come up with something more catchy. Still, at the risk of stretching extended metaphor beyond tolerance, the “Canoe” in this project is evocative. To the good:
• You can launch crafts in the water quite quickly. Accordingly, many initiatives have already tested. Several show promise, such as Backchannel’s system to aggregate web content based upon TV overlay clicks, Singlepoint’s platform to leverage mobile popularity by squeezing interactive ads into mobile TV deployments, and TiVo’s “Product Purchase” partnership with Amazon in which a TV remote can trigger an Amazon shopping interface.
• A canoe is a nimble vehicle. It allows precise-enough targeting to squeeze into hard-to-reach destinations. The segments most likely to purchase your products don’t congregate in single locales. As DRTV media buyers recognize, your best customers can emerge in small clusters from unusual places.
• If all in the canoe row in unison, they achieve far greater distances in a fraction of the time they could get there themselves. Project Canoe’s greatest promise is its strength in numbers. Joining forces to conquer technological challenges should ensure that the long-sought quartet of aforementioned opportunities should come to fruition in our lifetimes.
Lifetimes? Wow. That doesn’t sound fast. But what do you expect when you guide a canoe?
• Even the fastest canoe travels slowly. When Warner introduced the first truly interactive TV platform in 1977 in Columbus, the buzz about QUBE was enormous. The future of television—and advertising—had finally arrived! Except it’s thirty years later and we’re still foretelling TV and advertising’s future. In that context, Project Canoe’s upstream paddling—a mere half-year without game-changing breakthroughs—is hardly surprising.
• Canoes are small. No matter how nimble, they accommodate just a few people. BrightLine iTV Marketing Specialists contend that click rates for interactive TV ads range from three to six percent. But for now, that excellent percentage translates to just a handful of consumers—such as the “hundreds” who responded to a Sparks’ ticket campaign.
• Paddling is exhausting. If the current isn’t favorable, no amount of effort will push you safely to your target destination. Although we see many interactive campaign announcements, we rarely read reports of results—which means that reach and response remain meager.
Cable consortiums and standalone satellite programmers are acting aggressively to make iTV dreams a reality—despite all the challenges. DVRs’ first appearance, for instance, unleashed a groundswell of uneasiness that ungrateful consumers would skip past commercials that bankrolled free content. Unquestionably, TiVo and its DVR brethren were the enemies.
Ironically, these very same devices will usher in the iTV era. Clicking TV screen overlays to buy Oprah’s latest club choice from Amazon, or to view extra content about Nike’s new shoe line, won’t cause viewers to miss a minute of their shows. DVRS allow them to finish surfing and shopping, then return right to where they left off.
Better still, most DVR owners subscribe to pay programming. Providers have an address on file. For those who pay automatically, chargeable account numbers are also stored. So it shouldn’t be long before overlay clicks lock in purchases and product deliveries.
Good old DVRs! We loved ’em from the start.
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