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Bringing Interruption-Based Ads To the Web
Andy Smith writes "British production company Celador is to launch an Internet version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? as reported in this BBC story. This may interest Slashdot readers because the online competition, which will be free to enter, will feature "e-mercials". It's commonly accepted nowadays that the Net's traditional forms of advertising (banners, pop-ups and spam) have a very low success rate, so it seems inevitable that the next step is interruption-based advertising, which has worked fine for TV and radio. The Millionaire web site will display 7 second ads between rounds, and the player must watch them before continuing. E-mercials couldn't arrive in a more high-profile way, so once the online version of Millionaire launches we can expect to see similar ad systems used all over the web." Actually, rollouts of this have already been attempted - the media agencies called them "interstitals" and they are supposed to be 5 seconds between pages or so. Some of the drive behind this is that selling interruption-based ads is easier, because the media buyers who bought TV/radio ads are well familar with them.
You can't even download a complete page these days in 5-7 seconds, much less an animated GIF. How is this supposed to work if you don't have broadband access?
This will also give the masses yet another (good) reason to turn off JavaScript.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I don't know about the general viewer, but when I watch TV, I change the channel when the commercials come on.
I watch (and record) Babylon 5 religiously. However, I don't watch it at 6:00 PM CDT when it comes on the Sci-Fi channel. Instead, I capture the signal using a firewire converter box (Sony) and host adapter to my Linux box using dvgrab. Once the episode is recorded I fire up MainActor, snip out the commercials and splice the various parts together (moving the intro sequence to the beginning for good measure), then convert the resulting product to divx and burn to CD.
I end up watching each episode a day or so later (usually while the current episode is recording), but I do so without any commercial interruptions of any kind. Once I've watched the episode I put the freshly burned CD in a booklet with a hundred or so others. I already have most of season 4, all of season 5, and am currently getting season's 1 through 4. In the end I'll have every episode of my favorite show on CD, and have watched every episode without having seen a single commercial.
Not everyone is interested in taking the time to edit out commercials of course, but for those programs one really enjoys, viewing the show without interruption enhances the experience immensly and is well worth waiting a day or so to watch (while the render and conversion take place overnight).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Seriously, I haven't purchased anything I haven't actively sought out in years.
The fact is that the real way advertising works evades even the advertisers. It works by numbing your mind into not listening.
Market research is conducted to pinpoint empty pockets of market demand. Businessmen who know what they're doing enter only these market segments.
The fact is they know that consumers are already looking for this good or service, and they know where they looked for it already. All they have to do is create it and put it in the right place. Consumers will find it and they will sell their product.
All the ads do is numb your brain into deafness, so that people aren't able to tell you NOT to buy products. Think about it, when commercials come on, your brain turns off. You only really retain the info you willingly made yourself open to. When somebody tries to tell you something new that you weren't already open to...you don't listen.
This is why people listen to o-town, when the band next door keeping them up at night is the next beatles.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
As much as people here love MBA's, I'll post anyway:)
You are correct. The main goal of advertising is to help name/brand recognition. The point is that when the customer is ready to buy, your product is one that they will associate with that need.
There are of course many instances where this is not the case in the short term (coupons, vouchers, rebates, etc are the best examples) but the long term goal is still to keep your name in front of the consumer.
That's why Coke buys so much ad space/time. They are number one in the cola market (and a large player in the overall beverage market) but their market dominance is new since about the mid 1980's. (Actually with the introduction of 'Classic Coke'.) Their market share and the money spent on ads are directly proportional. Ditto Pepsi, who has not spent anywhere near the money Coke has.
(BTW, that MBA is with a specialization in IT, so I know how to manage you programmer drones. NOT!:)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
There is nothing wrong with your browser.
For the next 7 seconds, we will take control
of your computer.
We control the horizontal
We control the vertical
We control the Javascript.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Television has the limitation that, while you can interrupt the viewing experience, you don't know that the viewer actually saw the advertisement. The internet does not have this limitation. For a high demand environment such as a gameshow, the next logical step is to quiz the participant about the content of the ad.
Blatent questions like 'What product was being sold' will not work. But imagine the more subtle ones. For instance, set a scene - Two girls are sitting down at a bar drinking a name brand beverage. Add some action - a handsome may walks by; from the front, he looks good but his shirt shows large iron burn on the back. Then ask the user for input - which response would be funniest: (A) I'd never date a guy who can't iron (B) I always dump <competing beverage brand> on my clothes when they start to burn or (C) at least <beverage brand> tastes good and looks good. The user may be forced to pay attention and possibly identify with the characters in the ad.
Laugh now while you still can.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
It seems that internet ads are probably the only ads they can actually keep track of how many people have followed the link. In terms of other ads, how will said companies know if they work? Ie, if I buy a bar of Ivory soap, or a Dell computer, how the hell do they know whether I bought it based on the TV commercial during the Simpsons, a billboard on I-95, a magazine ad in Knitting Today? In fact, how do they know how many people even look at ads in magazines, radio, TV, billboards, etc.
People get numb to web ads after awhile, but so too with billboards on the highway. Yet billboards seem to be prospering. Radio and TV ads somewhat too.
What has led these companies to determine that all other ad sources are a success, but internet ads are a failure? .V / _` (_-<_-<
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__ __ ____ _ ______
\ V
make world, not war
As far as interstitials in particular are concerned, I already browse with at least 2 windows open, because most sites are so slow that I want something else to read while they're loading... and I'm going to interpret a 5-second interstitial as yet another delay, I can tell you right now.
Furthermore, it's a bit deceptive to say that interstitials "have worked just fine on TV." With an unprecedented amount of channel variety and choice, many people don't even SEE interstitial TV ads anymore... we just flip to the cooking channel. The direction TV is headed is product integration, like in "Survivor" when they got the Target(TM) gift pack or the Doritos(TM) and Pepsi(TM) picnic (which would have made me puke, incidentally, if I was starving in the middle of the desert). We've seen this in sports for a long time, but now it's to the point where they're working brands into the plot of TV shows.
Unfortunately, I'd say we're going to see more of this kind of thing in web content. Except the problem is, the web isn't as entertainment rich as TV; it's more about communication and news. How are we going to get brands integrated?
The birth of play back TV, with such products as real play and TiVo mark the end of the commercial. This products give power to a dumb TV set, let the end user have some say, and all have the ability to fast forward or jump 30secs ahead. Therefore interruption-based commercials will die. But, these products cant filter ads, thus any advertising In the show is seen.
The computer is one of the most (or the most) programmable and powerful tool for the average person. While banner ads have been unsuccessful, why would more annoying interruption based ads be better?
if giving power causes the death of interruption based ads for TV, how could it work on an amazingly more powerful machine? the logic behind all this is flawed. all a user would need to do is store the feed on their hard drive, and either filter out the ads somehow or just fastforward.
My guess is that these ads will grow very quickly, but once there is an easy to use tool for the general public, pop, the ads will be gone.
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
The Internet is not television, no matter how much advertisers are trying to make it that way.
When you put it this way, I can't help but think of BlipVerts from Max Headroom - time-compressed advertisements that were so intense (more than just a visual experience to) that sometimes the couch potatoes the ads were directed at exploded!
Somehow, I don't think any of us are going to explode from them, but, the way that ads are getting these days, BlipVerts may become a reality ;-)
(Jesus - I'm wondering if anyone on here even REMEMBERS the Max Headroom series! Strange but good show :-)
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
Who needs lifelines if you have a fast connection to Google ?
How are they going to implement this ?
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Should advertisers be forced to reimburse users for overhead costs of their adds? This is a crazy idea, but from a capitalistic standpoint, why should these users be forced to pay for information they never even wanted in the first place?
The logical solution, of course, is for users under a variable rate charge plan to avoid websites with lots of ads and/or interstitials. Or they could use programs such as WebWasher or JunkBuster.
Thoughts, comments, flames, ephiphanys . . .
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I don't know about the general viewer, but when I watch TV, I change the channel when the commercials come on. On the radio, I flip between 4 local stations looking for music. If I don't change the channel, I just ignore the radio/TV until the music/show is back on.
Now if I'm playing this game (dumb game, too easy compared to quality trivia games), there's little chance I'd be spending those few seconds seriously looking at the ads, I'd be thinking about the questions, etc. Besides, 7 seconds is an easy amount of time to just simply ignore. I guess we'll have to wait for the statistics, but I can't imagine the click-through rate will be good at all (after all, who wants to interrupt a game they enjoy playing?).
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Great...
Now, instead of the relatively long (30-60sec) T.V. Commercials, we have 7 second commercials. The next generation is not going to be able to focus reliably on anything if we continue to shorten the collective attention span. Does anyone else think that perhaps shortening the length and increasing the intensity of advertisements is a bad thing?
I personaly find myself repulsed by these "Interruption based" advertisements. I don't watch T.V., Ever, and I hate to thing my antipathy may soon extend ever further, as advertisement based media sends it's corrupted tendrils further into the internet.
In the words of Bill Hicks, "They are Demons, set loose on the earth, to lower the standards."
It'll work exactly like Bezerk Network, which has had this for years. You Don't Know Jack, Acrophobia, Get the Picture, etc. has small 15-second commercials in between "rounds". The commercials are done in Flash, and pressing a key on the keyboard brings up the advertiser's web site after the game -- a lot smarter idea than today's banner ads.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
It's commonly accepted nowadays that the Net's traditional forms of advertising (banners, pop-ups and spam) have a very low success rate
As it turns out, the click-thru rate on my television and radio is exactly zero, which when compared to web click-thru results seems pretty abysmal. Yet people still buy tv and radio ads.
I thought the purposes of advertising was to raise the profile of your product; when I keep hearing "Drink Coke" all day, I'm more likely to think "Coke" when the question "What do you want to drink?" comes up.
By this measure, I think that web advertising might be just as successful as traditional advertising. However, somebody set us up the meme that a web ad that doesn't result in click-thru is ineffective. I find this reasoning inconsistent. You're going to have to prove to me that they're less effective than traditional magazine and newspaper ads, but until then, I find the "low success rate" argument a falacy.
"This File Download has been brought to you by Microsoft, ReInventing the Internet, Just for you!. Before your download begins, let us remind you to check out the latest Microsft product, Microsoft Spam ..."
And Then:
"Before we continue your download ..."
This would be enough to make me change my mind on gun control.
;-)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Are there enough newbies out there to be convinced that the web is just a slow, more static version of television? What about the equivilent of channel surfing? Switching browser windows? These ads better be *Damn* fascinating to get lonely people to sit there and watch them.. Part of the attraction of TV is that you don't have to *do* anything, the web is more about making decisions, choosing a path, and I don't know a lot of people who *choose* to watch a lot of advertising unless it is 1)unique, 2)funny, 3)not been seen a thousand times before.
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Vices - what I lack in originality, I make up for in volume.
Has no one realized yet how the web works?
Advertising, if one applies the proper transformations, is actually product information dispersal online.
If John Deere wants to advertise it's mowers and stuff, what they can do (and probably should!) is to host and design gardening, landscaping, and home-maintainance websites!
*Grow* the market, and makes sure your name is attached to it! So create http://www.jdweb.com/Garden or http://www.jdweb.com/DIY, etc.
I think this can be expanded to *any* product. If you're Johnson and Johnson, create the home healthcare, health, and self improvement pages. Don't bother too heavily with product placement, I don't think, but when people start associating 'health' and 'wellness' with J&J, they've done good advertsing.
Let's try more esoteric examples: Coke, which sells a drink.
Actually, they sell a lifestyle, in which the drink is part of the image and the taste. Create something hip and free for people to visit; web boards, movie reviews, hiking, bike, and rollerblade info sites, etc. Sites where people can go do things, and while they are at it, drink Coke.
Safeway Foodstores could host cooking sites, with recipes. Activity sites, like Coke. BBQ sites, with hints, anecdotes, stories, and recipes. Whatever!
It's similar to how a portal works, but much more targeted.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Have you ever noticed that the banner ad at the top of a page will load and then, 20 or 30 seconds later, the page content will load around it?
How much of that do you suppose is deliberate?
--Blair
Banner ads *could* work.
If I knew that when I clicked on a banner ad that it would lead me to a decently-designed web page that would:
a) Give me information about the product
b)Give me information to contact the company about/purchase the item
c) Not waste my time
Then I would be a banner ad clicking fool. The s/n on banner ads is too high. I click the banner ads here on slashdot because they tend to be of higher quality (ThinkGeek tops the list, in my mind)
If there were an industry created regulating body (eAdsSeal?) that put a stamp of approval on ads (in the right hand corner or something, think BetterBusinessBeaurau (I can never spell that word)) I would be more likely to click them, if that seal meant that the ad would satisfy my criteria stated above.
Brant
Brant
Argle. Bargle.
...'Who Wants to Be A Millionaire' deserve to watch commercials. Lots of commercials.
[Insert the usual disclaimer here]