The Future of Advertising is Here

By rotating ads at the right time through these various media, an advertiser can create a campaign that hits its best prospects several times a day in different locations -- and in theory pay less to do it, since the advertiser won't be paying to put the ad up in front of a mass audience. "The idea," says David L. Smith, founder and CEO of San Francisco advertising agency Mediasmith, "is to vertically stack the ad frequency among different ad vehicles rather than to horizontally stack it within a single vehicle" -- as with a repeating television ad.

Of course, the ultimate smart-ad tool would enable a marketer to hit any individual with a low-cost, interactive message any time of day, any place -- a platform for a campaign that could identify and follow prospects through the world as if they were continuously online. Forward-thinking marketers even have a name for this dream medium. They call it...the mobile phone.

"Mobile-phone marketing today is where Internet advertising was in 1996 -- it's about to take off. There are already more mobile phones in use worldwide than televisions and computers put together."

Okay, turning your prospects' cell phones into ringing spam machines is probably not your idea of cultivating goodwill. And it's not likely to happen. Unlike e-mail, mobile phones aren't readily accessible to marketers -- mobile phone privacy is zealously guarded by big carriers like Verizon and Nextel, as well as by law. There's an opening, however, and smart advertisers are preparing to drive a truck through it. Provided a consumer clearly opts in -- say, by dialing or text-messaging a certain number -- carriers are slowly becoming more or less amenable to letting marketers return a text message, or even an audio or video file, to that consumer's phone. Mobile phone ads are already big in some parts of Europe and Asia, and it's just starting to take hold here. McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts are among the companies that have beamed coupons to U.S. cell phones, eliciting coupon-redemption rates as high as 17%. "Mobile-phone marketing today is where Internet advertising was in 1996 -- it's about to take off," says Michael Baker, president of Boston-based mobile-marketing firm Enpocket, which ran the Dunkin' Donuts campaign. "There are already more mobile phones in use worldwide than televisions and computers put together."

Throw in location tracking, a capability U.S. mobile phones are getting right now, and you've got a device that can prompt you with a coupon for a discount oil change just as you're driving by the lube shop. Enpocket has already run such a "location aware" mobile-phone campaign in Singapore on behalf of Intel. And it won't be long before you can pay for goods and services with a click of a cell-phone button, too -- something many mobile-phone users in Japan can do today.

While lack of relevance may be the single biggest shortcoming of conventional advertising, it's not the only one. Even if an ad ends up in front of potential customers, they won't necessarily pay attention to it -- especially if it comes up as part of a stream of other ads. To have a chance of getting past our mental filters and influencing our decisions, ads have to grab attention and be compelling. In a way, advertisers have to learn to make their ads less adlike and more entertainmentlike.

Take television advertisers. They've always had to deal with viewers running out of the room to grab a snack when the commercials come on, but now they're facing TiVo and other digital video recorders, whose owners already fast-forward through 70% of commercials. Meanwhile, fast-growing video-on-demand services that enable viewers to order up programs provide another means to go commercial-free. These developments have pushed marketers to jump into alternative forms of television advertising, including product placement (Coca-Cola cups in the hands of American Idol judges), sponsorship deals that get brand names into the titles of shows (as in College Sports Television Network's Nike Training Camp show), and "long form" video ads designed to be entertaining or relevant enough to attract video-on-demand viewers on their own (as with Canada's all-commercial Advertising on Demand Network).

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6  NEXT