Getting the ads in
Thinking has already gone beyond simply attracting visitors to watch videos on a website (although this is clearly hugely popular). On the back of the appetite people have for media, online advertising models are venturing in all sorts of experimental directions. Banner ads, while still common, are the poor cousin of the interactive ad which is only limited by imagination, or so they say.
Budweiser, for example, is currently preparing its upcoming website Bud.tv—instead of creating ads or content to distribute it is attempting to bypass established distribution altogether and host its own online media site, thereby skipping the usual advertising process to potentially holding its very own audience.
Until now online advertising has been more about search and direct marketing. says Andrew Frank, research director at Gartner. “There has been a lot of text and display ads but they’ve been mostly static banners or maybe flash banners—all more or less static. Now what you’re seeing is that most of the new money that’s coming into online advertising is coming from brand advertisers as opposed to direct marketers. That’s creating a need to do more video, more creative stuff that brand advertisers are interested in,” he says.
Another interesting sector is gaming. Simple product-related “punch the monkey” advergames created by advertisers have all captured our attention for a few minutes but these are growing increasingly sophisticated. Jeff Bell, vice president of marketing at car manufacturer Daimler-Chrysler famously said: “The future is such that all marketing will be interactive”, a remark about the success of its advergames that attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors.
And advertising actually within online and console games is already incredibly intricate. Frank says that companies such as Massive Inc. (recently bought by Microsoft) undertakes in-game ad placement. Signs and billboards that appear in stadiums and around tracks inside 3D games are treated as ad-avails and ads appear in a dynamic way, with details metrics projected about every element of them.
Online, virtual locations are popping up where people can go to interact with the brand itself. Vendors are creating environments for visitors to explore—you see a lot of this in MySpace, brands creating their own pages and trying to get links (most brands will have a page). Not having your brand represented on MySpace is now the exception just because of the size of the audience, says Frank. “One interesting example was the latest X-Men film. If you signed up to that page as a friend you would get a special feature on MySpace. I like to call this feature bait, a way of giving away something to get people to interact with your ad. There is no end to the clever methods people come up with,” he says.
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