TV Advertising is Dead, Long Live AdCasting
The previous push format of program, adbreak, program adbreak etc… is (not surprisingly) under threat from the push/pull internet methodology.
Forrester publish a report this week outlining what we all will be doing in about 5 to 6 years time to get our TV, it looks much like the current online model. TiVo was the beginning of this revolution as far as I am concerned. Mediacasting (as I call it) is a divergent idea and requires a completely new behaviour pattern for advertisers to push their wares.
The only idea that I can see surviving is product placement, all other forms are intrusive and ruin to some extent the push pull relationship with whatever device you are using. Imagine your x-box stopping to show you an ad for a new game in the middle of your game (extreme example of course). As we are increasingly immune to large scale push ad campaigns, the new Internet style advertising is all about product placement, ask Google (who are currently pushing their TV advertising through the Dish Network).
This is not to say that push advertising will die. I predict that large scale TV ad campaigns will become more expensive and exclusive in the long term - a kind of badge of membership, only there for top brands at a national level. This will probably happen after the price war that kills off a lot of ‘too slow to catch up’ ad companies happens in the short term.
There is a new behaviour realm for Ad companies wishing to reach audiences, lets call it AdCasting. AdCasting is all about placing your product ‘next’ to, or wrapping it around the content that your audience is interacting with. It’s about granular campaigns that are technical, behavioural and contextual and that deliver simple messages over many mediums. It can be seen as exciting because there are not many rules and a big knowledge gap. The wide net of ads cast (AdCasting :)) will be multi-format and multi-platform and measured individually for perfomance criterias - relevance, coverage and effect.
This is possible because of a few things: statistics (which advertisers now expect to be completely accurate, no more guesswork), data portability (XML) and building experience of the typical conversion rates for each format (text unit, flash unit, video unit, radio/podcast placement etc…). These combine to provide a powerful alternative to traditional media push, whatever the medium. The real power here is accurately measuring the holy cow of ROI. If your advertising medium cannot support these kind of accurate stats, it will simply become a gateway to a medium that can.
