December's Column By New Media Age Editor Mike Nutley
Last month I went to the Ad:tech conference in New York, one of the premier events for the US online marketing and advertising industry. The show had contracted dramatically during the post-boom years, but this year it was significantly larger, claiming over 4,000 visitors. But the talk of a resurgent industry, which mirrors the UK mood that I discussed in my last column, was tempered by a number of people discussing growing consumer resistance to interruptive advertising.
The evidence cited spanned old media as well as new, and included the number of people downloading pop-up blocking software, the growing anger about email spam, the fact that 50million Americans have signed up to the "do not call me" list, and that among people who have bought Personal Video Recorders (PVRs), 81% said their main reason for doing so was to skip ads.
Various panellists drew a series of conclusions from these phenomena. The first is that people don't want advertising. Give them the tools to avoid it and they embrace them. The second is that if people don't want to be interrupted, whether it's during a TV programme or while searching for something online, advertisers will be forced to adopt different strategies in order to get their messages through. Finally, that this means that the power in the relationship between advertisers and consumers is inexorably moving in favour of the consumers. Consumers will no longer passively accept whatever messages advertisers direct at them. Instead advertisers are going to have to seek consumers' permission to send them messages, and that permission will come with restrictions on where, when and in what format.
This shift applies to all advertising media, although some, such as television, are more susceptible than others for separate reasons. But online is uniquely placed to take advantage of the shift, because it is uniquely able to not only gather information about customers' preferences about the advertising messages they are prepared to receive, but also to support the mass personalisation and mass customisation that makes such communication possible. In fact, what is now being talked about is very like what we were promised from online advertising back in its early days.
GM O’Connell, founder of Modem Media, talks about "advertising as service", the need for advertising to offer some value to the consumer. His company has been working with Kraft Foods in the US to create a site that offers busy mothers a source of quick recipes for the family evening meal. The idea isn't to push Kraft products, but to promote Kraft as a brand that offers a service to customers. Similar strategies are being adopted by producers of such FMCG products as washing powder and nappies.
The response to this line of thought, both at the conference and among people in the UK with whom I've discussed is subsequently, has been mixed. Many have rubbished it, stating that the percentage of people opting out in the US is roughly the same as opted out of UK direct mail at the recent census, and that that opt-out hasn't spelt the end of direct mail. But others have been more cautious. They point out, for example, that no-one yet knows what form mass-market use of PVRs will take, and what forms of advertising may evolve to suit it.
But the models being proposed so far have one thing in common; they don't look like the classic 30 second TV spot. In the early days of the Internet, pundits predicted the death of branding, as intelligent shopping engines would conduct all our purchases for us online purely on the basis of price. That hasn't happened; in fact brands are more important tools for navigating our world than ever. But there's a groundswell of evidence that the way those brands will be built in the future is going to be radically different, and online is going to be at the core of that process.
Michael Nutley, Editor, New Media Age, http://www.nma.co.uk
Michael Nutley, Editor, New Media Age, http://www.nma.co.uk/