[Sigia-l] Advertising Models (Was flash banners etc...]

[John O'Donovan]

Jared wrote:
>> I fear the future is grim -- the advertisers won't give up.

For some light relief I think this topic is worth promoting. I have worked
on advertising (mainly rich media and interactive TV) and was thinking about
information architectures for advertising. Consider it a necessary evil and
then starting from this premise, consider how to best deal with it.

I'll start with the status quo (the bad news) and then to a platform
solution I have worked with (the good news)...

In Bobs case it is down to the design of the advert and is nothing to do
with Flash - Flash is not the baddie here, it is whoever designed the
annoying advert. This argument spins around a lot but you may as well say "I
would like you to remove those annoying adverts that break up the columns of
text in your newspaper". In this case the medium is the web and the format
is flash and these are the tools that the site has chosen.

Advertising does have an obligation to be noticed, but where a point can be
made is when you feel it detracts from the content. For exactly the same
reason that you should not use the Blink tag (Leave it!) you should not make
the advertising so annoying as to make the content unviewable.

But who decides what is annoying?

Sorry to say Bill, that if you don't want advertising then you are going to
have to move to a new planet and create a new race...

Now the good news...

I have designed and built digital adverts for interactive TV (iTV) as part
of cross media campaigns, so lets take a parallel in Interactive TV
advertising.

In the UK the interactive advertising is "opt-in" and unobtrusive on iTV.
How? Because that is the way the platform is regulated and structured. The
interactive advertising is accessed through the ubiquitous "Red" key on the
remote control and this is the ONLY way allowed for an advertiser to take
over the User Experience. The user must press "Red" and commit to say "I
want to see that" before the advert loads up. (This does not include banner
advertising on other parts of interactive menus which are always visible but
you have to already have pressed the Red button to get to these menus...)

For advertisers the challenge is to make the advertising engaging enough for
the user to want to go and look at it and this balance actually works - the
user enters the advert deliberately. Eventually this leads us to better
targeting; remember the digital equivalent of the "No flyers or papers
please" on the letterbox is useful for the advertisers as well. They want to
focus on the people who are interested in the products.

We did it by giving away something the user genuinely wants (either a
freebie or some information or service or entertainment). The "Red" key is
sold as the added value rather than intrusive advertising. When they see the
on screen graphic indicating there is interactive content, viewers think
"There is maybe something interesting here - I'm gonna take a look". If they
don't they don't. If no-one does then we must have hit the wrong demographic
but that never happened.

And anyone who says that they have never been influenced by an advert is a
liar unless they have never seen one. It's just finding the right adverts to
show to the right people. You will also find that advertising can be very
engaging - even online, eg...

"[rich media study] found that broadband rich media advertising has the
potential to provide an approximately 22 percent higher recall, an
approximately 35 percent increase in propensity to click, and roughly the
same likeability as standard banner ads", Jupiter Research
(not to say that people like banner ads but relatively, rich media is no
more annoying and offers more potential)

Perhaps there is hope...

Cheers,

jod