Rethinking Internet Advertising

"I got the feeling we're not in Kansas anymore!" And just like that, by opening a door, Dorothy brought "color" to cinema and the world in 1939.

Unfortunately, this watershed moment has not taken place on the Internet yet: We are still on television! Or so advertisers seem to believe.

The metrics have changed, we count clicks and measure engagement now but the rest is the same, pathetically similar in fact as advertisers try to squeeze their true and proven TV formats on our smaller, interactive Internet screens with utmost disregard to the viewers' experience and the effect on brands.

But who can blame them? 50 years of advertising cornucopia on TV have made them soft. How can you change what has worked so well for so long? Surly, the 30 second spot must be the ultimate ad experience to insure that consumers reach for the recognized names when they select products in supermarkets' alleys?

Or could it be that our world is truly changing and that not only brick and mortar stores are on the way out but the full advertising ecosystem which fed brand recognition to shoppers is going too? A true paradigm shift unrecognized in its amplitude and scope as they usually are?

But then again, how is it possible that what is supposed to be the most creative part of our society, the out-of-the-box thinkers are all taken wrong footed, pushing the wrong messages the wrong way on a media they do not understand well, alienating viewers instead of wooing them?

To answer this question, we need to understand better the Internet, the way it works, it's impact on people and ultimately to rethink advertising.

Originally advertising is nothing more than commercial information and as such it needed a name (before it became a brand), an address and a product. This gave us the beautiful streets of traditional European cities with their easily recognizable shop signs as in Salzburg.

With the industrial revolution and print media, things became more complicated. People could not see anymore what you were doing so you needed to lure them. Usually a few words and an address would do. But slowly the inserts became more sophisticated with better design and longer messages crowding the front and back pages of newspapers and magazines. True advertising had arrived.

Then, soon after the first world war, radio came of age and with it the second dimension of advertising: Time. The duration of your message was now of critical importance. You needed to cram as much information in as little time as possible. Slogans worked best.

And finally television in the 1950s. It took a surprisingly long time to build up the post-war consumer society and for all the cogs in the machine to move smoothly. Early TV ads are often little more than a still newspaper picture with a radio text read in the background. Then TV commercials were refined and the TV spot was born for mass audience with precise targeting and effective messaging.

But once the system was in place, it went on and on. Like the time machine traveler, The world changed around advertising but advertising did not change much over the years. Finally, the Internet spread in the 1990s and with it out of nowhere, the new ad giants, Google and Facebook were born. Because they were pioneers, they could do no wrong. Their strength vindicated by the new metrics they created to actually measure the impact of advertising: CPM (Cost per thousand), CPC (Cost per Click) and CPA (Cost per Action).

But the real challenge was to manage the infinite but highly diluted real estate of the Internet and more specifically how to grab the attention of viewers which at 9 seconds flat was said to be less than that of a goldfish!

And this is how we ended up with what cannot be called anything but pollution and garbage on our screens: Banners, promoted outstream videos, sponsored contents, forever "jumping" in-feed ads (to make sure you click on them by "accident") and the rest. A jungle of sneaky (native advertising) or obstructive ideas designed to pull attention and distract by any means available. Each new idea being worse than the one before with an arm race for our dwindling attention at war with our natural organic defenses embodied by ad blockers.

In fact, over the last few years, the average Internet experience has become truly awful with a ceaseless barrage of ads and interruption to the point that older less savvy people are pushed out of the Internet outright.

Clearly something has gone wrong. But what can we do about it?

The first step is to recognize that the Internet is not television and that what worked well with a passive audience on TV cannot be replicated or achieve the same results with an interactive pull media such as the Internet.

You now need to engage people with your brand or message to actually reach your audience. The challenge of course is how to do this.

We haven't found a universal solution yet because there are none! Given the opportunity, different people behave differently and understanding the dynamic nature of the Internet and the fact that people are not the passive audience they used to be helps.

This in fact changes everything!

Shouting your brands name in bold characters on your target's screen, interrupting their reading, following them with pesky ads from page to page with incessant calls to action are the best way to discover the interactive nature of the Internet with your message being muted or worse shut off completely. A feedback which has cleverly been obfuscated by Internet platforms.

But this does not mean that advertising is dead and condemned to be counter-productive from now on. Quite the opposite in fact. But to fully take advantage of the Internet, advertisers must understand better how their targets behave and are clustered by the opportunities offered.

The reason why this has not happened yet is due to the overwhelming presence of the Internet giants who in their rush for profits and over-reliance on one media only, have been unable or rather unwilling to understand the profound revolution that the Internet represents and the fact that with it, advertising has entered a new dimension of communication where instead of replacing the former media as was the case until now, the Internet is transcending them all and can be used to unify communication on disparate platforms.

Consequently, what brands need,  more than an "Internet strategy", is to rethink how to engage with their clients in a more proactive way across platforms and touch points. A far more daunting challenge which explains why so few have been up to the task yet.

So if you cannot splash your "name" on the right "segments" screens, how can you reach your audience in the Internet age?

Simply, you are back to the basics of marketing, trying to understand your audience, its tastes and likes, what turns them on and off. Their needs and expectations. their aspirations and how to answer them.

In this respect, the Nike campaign for the 2018 winter Olympic games in Korea is interesting to my opinion as it shows a possible way forward. They sponsored evens and stars the usual way to display the brand during the games but then expanded their scope after the games by actually creating new events such as marathons where thousands of people participated, paid for their gear, generating a buzz online.   

This is the difference between a pop-up on your screen seen as an interruption which will irritate you and a message from a friend on WhatsApp asking you if you want to participate to a race and sending you a couple of pictures after the event: Soft pressure! 

The move to a true multi-platform advertising experience is on-going. It will be a complex solution adapted to multiple behaviors and segments. Advertisers will exchange your information for actual insight. Soften or harden the intensity of their messaging, add AI to analyze feedback and adapt faster. It is quite likely that we ain't seen nothing yet as advertising finally adjust to the Internet.