Digital is one of the biggest buzzwords sweeping the advertising world these days. From music and movies, to phone apps and social media sites, people conduct their day’s work, relaxation, and social life through some kind of digital outlet. Naturally, if an advertiser wants to reach the audience they have become accustomed to in television, radio, or traditional print they now have to look at how to do so through the Internet. Luckily, in this age of digital consumption, there are plenty of opportunities to advertise in that space. Never before has so much content been available to so many people for free, and that content is largely made available because the creators and/or hosts can monetize their efforts through advertising. This massive shift in the way content is published and consumed, and the major changes that have been required by advertisers to remain relevant, has caused websites such as Fast Company to refer to the digital revolution as the biggest change to advertising since the advent of the Television.
Not surprisingly, however, this tectonic shift makes lots of established professionals nervous. How useful will their years of knowledge be if the nature of advertising is completely changed? Is there any job security if most ad-men are put in a position where they must essentially relearn the industry? How are agencies going to adapt to the new methods, new technologies, and new distribution channels? Is media planning made increasingly irrelevant as physical media buys decline in favor of buying into online ad networks such as Google Adsense, DoubleClick, Brightroll and others?
Ultimately, however, advertising still focuses on three methods of reaching an audience. David Ogilvy wrote in his seminal book, Ogilvy on Advertising, that advertising was built on three key pillars: namely, radio, television, and print. This idea is repeated again almost a half century after the founding of Ogilvy’s agency in the 1950s, by Luke Sullivan in “Hey Whipple, Squeeze This” when he is explaining the foundational concepts on which to build great advertising. Now, a little over a decade after the first addition of Sullivan’s book was published, this remains as true as it ever was, even with all the changes that the Internet has supposedly made to the way things are advertised. Audio, video, and print are still amongst the best ways to reach people.
While people may be using the AM/FM radio less and less in favor of personal music players such as iPods and other mp3 players, this has been matched in recent years by the spread of smartphones and their largely unfettered access to Internet radio stations. Similarly, the home stereo has been displaced by music played from a computer or streamed from the Internet. Despite digital technology providing greater access to music, and more convenience when consuming it, people still listen to music in the two distinct ways that they always have. On the one hand, people listen to music from their personal library, and on the other hand, people listen to music that they don’t own, often in order to discover new artists or genres. In the past this was seen in the dichotomy between songs played on a record player as opposed to the radio. Now it can be seen as the difference between an iTunes and Spotify. In fact, there are a plethora of music streaming services that depend on advertising to monetize their offerings. Even the non-musical aspects of radio, from radio-plays to talk radio, have found a home on the web in the form of podcasts, many of which monetize their content through advertising or direct sponsorship. In essence, these broadcasters, be it a music service like Pandora or a comedy podcast hosted by Adam Carolla, are looking for the same thing that radio advertising looks for, 30 to 60 second audio bites that sell a product or service.
While most Internet services offer additional options for the advertisers, such as space for graphics and/or the ability to link to a webpage, when you cut away all of the digital ornamentation, what you are left with is a basic radio spot. Don’t get me wrong, that digital ornamentation can be powerful stuff, but the important thing to remember is that the audio ad is the core piece of the advertisement, and the rest is just extra. I’ll go into more detail about why this is true later in the post.
Television is also making its fumbling transition towards digital as consumers put more pressure on networks to provide their shows for free and on-demand through the Internet. Alternative media sites, like YouTube or Blip.TV are also creating infrastructure by which independent media producers can publish their shows online with the majority of financial support coming from pre-, post-, and, occasionally, mid-roll ad breaks. Finally, livestreaming is growing as an alternative to television for live events, with its own system of ad breaks that mimic TV. As with music, even though digital has changed the way these ads are viewed, the core principles of the advertising remain the same. The same ideas that go into making the best advertising for TV can be applied to making video ads for the web. Hell, even the ads themselves can be reused. Again, there is additional digital ornamentation that online broadcasting provides advertisers, but this shouldn’t distract advertisers from the fact that, at an essential core level, video ads are the same no matter where or how they are broadcast.
Print is the medium that has struggled the most with its transition to digital. Newspapers and magazines suffered an incredibly slow transition to the web, and in the process fell way behind their digital-only contemporaries. Subsequently, websites that arose to fill the print media void in the online space developed their own standard form of advertising in banner ads. However, banner ads come with a host of issues, that I will likely address in detail in another post, so some larger publishers have begun looking for alternatives.
Some sites have experimented with medium-sized image inserts inside articles, placed amidst the text like pictures in a modern textbook. Others have tried placing large image based pages that load in-between clicking an article link and landing on the actual article. These different approaches share many characteristics with print advertising. The medium images are a lot like newspaper insert ads and the large images function a lot like full-page magazine ads. If dissatisfaction with banner ads continues, both with publishers and advertisers, then this experimentation will continue, and digital print ads will shift more towards the kinds of ads most agencies are already familiar with creating for traditional print media.
Even if banner ads remain the dominant form of advertising on the web, like with audio, video, and print, there are established techniques that can be applied to the work. Specifically, banner ads share a lot of characteristics with outdoor ads, which themselves are in many ways an extension of traditional print ads. Horizontal banner ads can be designed with the same principles as outdoor advertising in horizontal spaces, such as the sides of buses and other public transit, on highway billboards, and across the tops of buildings. Similarly vertical banner ads can be designed with the same principles that are used to develop for vertical outdoor spaces, such as bus-shelter ads, and down the side of a building. As with audio and video advertising, print benefits from, but should not be defined by, digital ornamentation. Whether it is experimentation with advertisements that resemble traditional print ads, or banner ads that resemble outdoor advertising, the same methodologies agencies developed for advertising through graphic design still apply.
Earlier I referred to all of the extra bits that go into digital advertising as digital ornamentation. This includes all of the additional features that digital provides that aren’t found in their traditional counterparts. For example, services like Spotify let the advertisers add splash pages to their advertisements that appear when the advertisements are playing. These splashes appear as an image that resembles an old print ad where the whole image links to a company website or landing page for the product being sold. In video, ads are sometimes ornamented by interactivity, such as an ad that pauses and lets you pick from a variety of advertising stories, like a “choose your own adventure” advertisement. It is important to remember that, while these add something extra to the experience, and can set one ad apart from another, the reach of these extras will always be fairly low. This may be difficult to believe, considering how much some agencies seem to put stock in this kind of thing, but consider how most people consumer their music, television, or print. Music is commonly put on in the background while doing another activity, such as a household chore, in the background at work, or while exercising. Someone who has put on some Frank Sinatra in the living room, while they are in the kitchen making spaghetti, is never going to see, let alone click on, the splash page, no matter how compelling the audio or the visual is for the ad. Similarly, watching television is a very passive experience. You turn the TV on, sit down on the couch with the remote, and turn off your brain. Even when watching shows on the computer, this same sort of passivity applies, despite the controls being right at one’s fingertips. Again, the likelihood that someone will be moved from a passive state to an active one, enough to click on the splash page, is pretty low. Despite consuming almost all of my television these days through Hulu, and similar services, I think I have only ever clicked on an ad once. So if all of these splash pages are only going to be marginally effective, the value of the advertising must lie in the message of the core ad, the audio for radio equivalents, the video for television equivalents, and the image for print equivalents.
In the end, though, while there are some differences in the implementation, the media buying, and the production when it comes to digital, things are more alike than they are different. Sure, agencies need to consider how their advertising ties into digital strategy, like social media or product landing pages. And they probably ought to consider whether a digital specialist needs to be brought in as an employee or contractor; all of that digital ornamentation can be powerful stuff, not to mention the experimental work like content marketing, interactive social media campaigns, and other atypical advertising. Ultimately, though, the core nature of advertising has changed less than everyone seems to think. Yes, the exciting advertising that gets mentioned in Adweek, wins awards, and generally gets agencies the attention they desire is from the school of atypical advertising. I myself have, in previous posts on this blog, extolled the virtues of such advertising. But in the end, agency’s bread and butter campaigns, even in the digital space, are still built out of the same building blocks for print, television, and radio ads that have existed, though continually being adapted for the times, since the 1950s. If anything, this has been more of a digital evolution than a digital revolution.