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IBM Predicts Massive Shifts In Advertising
Tech.Luver writes with news from IBM Global Business Services about its new report, The End of Advertising as We Know It (report PDF, summary PDF). It forecasts greater disruption for the advertising industry in the next five years than has occurred over the previous 50. Among the conclusions: broadcasters will have to change their mass audience mind-set to cater to niche consumer segments. Distributors will need to deliver targeted, interactive advertising for a range of multimedia devices. Advertising agencies must become brokers of consumer insights and guide allocation of advertising dollars amid exploding choices. All players must adapt to a world where advertising inventory is increasingly bought and sold in open exchanges vs. traditional channels.
the world is fucking saturated in the stuff, and something has to give.
I know i'm personally sick to death of mobile phone dating scams and panty liner ads being marketed to me on TV.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
get ready to update your adblock extensions!
The technology already exists to almost completely avoid adverts. PVRs, downloading, adblock plugins, spam filters etc. I never recognise any of the ads when forced to watch them at a friends house.
The solution advertisers will come up with is to be more devious. More ads in more annoying places, that are harder to avoid. Mass astroturfing, product placement, adware etc. It's no wonder Microsoft are filing patents for ad delivery at the OS level - they could become the only people capable of delivering ads at all.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
And submitted by tech.luver, who is racing with ponca down the the bottom of the pit where roland lives.
/. would not directly link these people's names to any other website than /. these people will go away.
All these people want to do is promote their blogs. If
This is not new. The upheaval in the advertising industry has been causing a change for the past five years. Even the largest ad agencies have made broad changes to their operating structure and moved to a much more dynamic and multi-media format.
Media giants (NBC, CBS, ABC, BBC, CBC, ITV, etc., etc.) have embraced this change months and/or years ago and are moving their sales to much more targetted audiences, with the exception of prime time mega-shows.
Media buying agencies have stopped looking only at Nielsen data and circulation data (reach and frequency figures) and are using far more types of information to make their choices. The 10,000 digital cable channels and the explosive growth of on-line advertising forced that a long time ago.
All of these groups (perhaps except IBM, who just woke up) have been looking at how people watch and segmenting them by attitude, life stage and much more than age and income. Especially when the advertisers are using a combination of TV, Radio, Internet and maybe even print (there still is printed stuff out there, right? It's not all just bits, now?). The amount of information used to make decisions is growing.
I, for one, welcome our Google media overlords.
Allow me to summarize the summary:
"In the future, advertising will still be >95% buzzwords, such that entire paragraphs of text have no content whatsoever."
IBM is "forecasting" what has already happened and what everyone in the industry already knows. Their study is simply an assessment of the present moment. They are "predicting" -- or rather, strongly encouraging by way of statistical evidence -- that the big corporate laggards in their customer base will/should get with the program, preferably IBM's, as soon as possible.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
rain when the creek has already flooded.
...is stopping it dead in its tracks. And as far as targetted ads go, I prefer targetting ads before they can target me.
When Coke realizes that nobody's watching their commercials, it may get expensive to watch Heroes.
I don't know how much advertising (that I don't watch, thanks to my DVR) subsidizes my TV watching, but I do know that I wouldn't pay that much more than I currently pay for TV. Does that mean the end of TV? I like a small number of shows. If they're too expensive for me to pay for (or worse, too expensive for enough people, but not me, so the shows go bankrupt even though I'd happily pay) will I lament the good old days when the corporations helped fund them?
Is that worse than it is now?
I don't know. But this post is brought to you by Gatorade, with the electrolytes that plants love.
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As users get more choice, advertisers must get bolder. Why? Because people are unaware of products and services.
.. people would no longer watch ads on TV. So the only thing advertisers can do is put intrusive advertising on webpages .. but eventually users will reject and move on from that.
.. but it's easier just having a domain name and being able to block emails getting sent to a particular adress.
.. if I sign on using backslashdot@slashdot.org for a company's mailing list .. and I find out they have been selling that email address I can just block that particular email address. All other @slashdot emails sent to me would work.
.. I click on web ads if they inform me of inventive stuff I could really use.
So expect advertisers to pull more and more stunts (for the sake of the economy and with the blessing of govt. of course).
For example the forced sitting through a boring 20 second ad that doesnt even mention the product until the very end. Full screen web ads should get to the point within 1 or 2 seconds MAX.
If people only par for and download online the tv shows they like
And so they will resort to buy mailing lists and sending spam.
That's why I am going to have to resort to using a different email for every thing I sign up for.
I mean the service provided by mailinator is good
So for example lets say slashdot was my domain
Note, I am not against advertising
Personally, I HATE any website that has animated advertising of any type. When I'm trying to read an article, whether its somebodies personal blog or a major news corporation, I find animation of any type highly distracting. The animation always distracts my eyes from reading the article that I'm actually interested in. Rather than put up with distracting advertisements I make use of various tools to block Flash, animated gifs, etc. If those don't work for a particular website then I simply stop visiting those sites. For example, I used to visit the ABC news website (abcnews.com) on a regular basis but ever since their last couple of "upgrades" to their website I've avoided them like the plague. I find their use animation on their front page extremely annoying. Back when they had a more static home page I would visit their site on a daily basis, but they've effectively driven me away from all the "glitz" they've added. I now go elsewhere for the news and won't got back to ABC news any time soon. They need to realize that animated makeovers that do nothing more than demonstrate that their designers know all about "Web 2.0", CSS, etc. has a huge potential for turning away potential visitors.
Let's face it - user fees would skyrocket if there was no advertising. I'd rather watch advertisements that cater to my interests, rather than tampon commercials!
"Distributors will need to deliver targeted, interactive advertising for a range of multimedia devices."
Dancing aliens for everyone!
or.................use *1* address for anything you think is going to spam you?
Put simply, it is this: If you know or meet someone in advertising or marketing, punch them in the face as hard as you can.
No, this isn't some Bill Hicks-like rant. Just think about how all-pervasive advertising and marketing is - it's everywhere, it's inescapable, and it serves no purpose other than to separate you from your money. On top of that, in every waking moment - from the minute you get up and put on your clothes or make your breakfast, to the second you turn out the light at night - in a million different little ways, it impinges on your mental environment. In itself 99% of it is of no benefit to you, it's existence is detrimental to society as a whole, and there's a whole industry devoted to finding ways of force-feeding you more of it. In modern society, about the only thing you encounter more often than advertising is air molecules.
The only way they'll stop hurting you is if you hurt them first. Remember that next time you find yourself idly whistling a jingle...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Actually, are you familiar with the Gooch strategy?
Has netcraft confirmed it?
Lest we forget the purpose of advertising, it's simply a way to make a service/product known to others. It should be obvious that advertising is simply not needed as much now as before. The very existence of my personal website with a few projects is automatically advertised on several web search engines in the form of search results. Like many industries, advertising companies will becomre more of a parasite in the future, attempting to justify its existence (via more advertising, of course!).
>"My guess? Direct downloads supported by 'channels' that serve up the first few episodes of random series to get people interested. Different series will aim at very niche markets. You really don't need a very large percentage of the population to support a TV series. Roughly 200,000 people (which is nothing when your potential audience is everyone worldwide) paying up $2-$3 (aka pocket change) per episode and you have a reliable budget of a half million per. You can make some damn fine television for $500,000 an episode."
What you just described is known as trial-ware (aka crippleware, adware, etc). Remember all those shareware and demo programs that "if only a small percentage of potential buyers pay for it, we'll be rich"? All those game demos - so many, that nobody ever paid for anything, because there were too many demos around. Play one for an hour, get bored, play another for 15 minutes, get bored, ...
I could point to lots of examples -- the most recent is likely the Mac/PC ads, which I went out of my way to watch. Another would have to be the Chuck Norris / Mountain Dew ads.
Most ads are utterly forgettable, except for the conditioning they do -- or they're just really annoying, like "punch the monkey". Some ads, particularly Google text ads, can be helpful without being in the way.
But the best ads are the ones that are entertaining enough that you actively seek them out. (That, and complete grassroots -- NOT astroturf -- I drink Mountain Dew mostly because of The Whiteboard.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I wonder whether the obituarists will recall Mailer's dissent from the first wave of feminism in the early 1970's. Given his own notorious marital relationships, it was hard to take him seriously as a sexual philosopher. I nevertheless read and enjoyed The Prisoner of Sex, though too long ago to vouch for it now. But among the recollections of Mailer worth bringing to mind is one that reader Bob Day sent us a while back regarding a Mailer lecture at the Unversity of Colorado dating from that era:
After an overlong and fawning introduction, Mr. Mailer waited offstage (obviously prolonging the applause), then strutted out, his shoulders pulled back, dressed all in black. At the time he was quite well known for antagonizing women's libbers, so there was quite a contingent of sign waving female protestors, and some males as well.
As he began to speak in his rapid fire and theatrical style, he was often heckled from the large audience. Most of this had to do with his supposedly misogynistic leanings. After 10 minutes or so, he decided to respond, telling the audience he would be happy to deal with the shouters directly. He then challenged them to "hiss me resoundingly," which they did with some gusto. He then derided their effort and commitment, telling them how puny was their voice, and implored them to do better. The response was much bigger the next time, with lots of profanity and vile name calling. Mailer stood there stoically receiving their rage.
When the din had mostly died down and people were waiting for his response, Mailer simply looked out over the audience and said, "Thank you, obedient bitches."
The tension had gotten just high enough, and the anticipation was certainly high enough, so that this perfect piece of theatrical verbal judo caused the room to explode with screams, hoots, laughter and sustained applause. I have never seen before or since such a wonderful performance.
Of course, though the protesters were afraid to open their mouths thereafter, that didn't stop one of them from going back to their dorm room and calling in a bomb threat. It was the perfect end piece to a perfect evening.
Advertising wouldn't be so annoying if it didn't show me ads I don't care about. If I could watch the Discovery Channel without ads for car insurance (don't have a car), mortgage refinancing (don't have a mortgage), or intimate feminine products (don't have girly bits) I would be happier.
If the shows had ads for things I actually cared about I might watch through the commercial break. But in order for that to happen, I'd have to give up a lot of personal information, which we're all reluctant to do. Properly targeted ads will get watched. But there's no way to generate targeting without raising privacy concerns.
Internet ads are slightly better because they can at least geo-target me and have an idea what kind of page I'm already looking at. But when it comes to TV, radio(!), and other media I'm not sure what the solution is.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
Considering the subsidies I am paying to Comcast for 100+ channels I never ever watch, I am willing to pay much, much less to watch TV with no commercials. I long for a world where every channel is a 'premium' channel so I can pay only for the ones I actually want to watch. Much better for the TV channels to be answerable to the consumer and not the advertisers.
Sounds more like Google after-effect...
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
I can believe that this might happen, but remember that most of what the Internet is today is supported by broadcast advertising. Television is supported by broadcast advertising, on both OTA broadcast and cable channels.
If the bottom were to drop out of broadcast advertising on the Internet, on television, in print publications, we would see a massive contraction in the economy and in all things familiar since the latter half of the 20th century. Most of this growth has been financed and nutured by advertising in one way or another. I believe we could see a contraction back to the 1800's with a far more niche-oriented advertising.
What few people seem to talk about is a complete shift away from advertising. The whole point of ads is to raise awareness of a product, generally with the aim of aggrandizing it or simply perking up desire.
With the internet, it's getting pretty hard to pull the wool over anyone's eyes.
With the internet and high-density media, it's no longer necessary to subsidize every kind of content distribution channel with advertising.
Take TV shows. Let's say we're working on a fairly big show with a season budget of $10 million. A DVD box set costs, say, $5 per to produce, and you can sell them for $45. We want to make 15% profit, so our target earnings are $11.5M. If we ship 400k sets, you get $1.6M gross. That leaves $5.5M for advertising, mastering the discs, etc.
Note how this is all *before* you throw a single episode on TV or the 'net. You could sell direct to DVD, and promise not to put them on air before everyone got their shot at the DVD. Then airing becomes the icing on the cake.
I don't know the industry averages, but I know this is a perfectly workable system for at least some shows. Babylon 5 was produced for $10M or less each season, and the DVD sales alone made more than $500M in revenue by 2006. For its 5 seasons, that means there has already been a 1,000%(!) profit margin, since they weren't losing too much money on the original broadcast. And for anybody who's counting the score for copyright lengths, that's before the first season would have left a 14 year protection.
So yes, there will always be advertising. Search engines are showing a great new form, and as news outlets move to digital they may capture something similar. But the idea that every piece of entertainment media has to be paid for by advertisers is a qaint idea of a bygone era.
There's nothing worse than going to a web site, and all of a sudden, some jingle pops out.
This is my sig.
Who knew?
hosts
0 pixel.quantserve.com
et al
In fact, being able to selectively read advertising is the foundation of newspapers. This is an ideal situation for the 50 percent of U.S. adults that read newspapers. I get my Best Buy, Circuit City and Fry's ad every Sunday and can then buy based on that. These ads support the content that I want to read and are there for when I want them.
I remember clearly the day I started to reject Google cookies
That was a day I was sick to my stomach while traveling for work. You know, flu sick, feverish, throwing-up sick in a hotel room. I was not happy.
I was using my gmail account to complain to my girlfriend. She was sympathetic, but Google ... that's another story.
Being sick, I didn't dwell on the fact that Google reads my mail, and then targets me with what their very intelligent software thinks I want.
Google thought I needed to lose weight, and filled up the right hand column with diet ads. You know, stomach -> (no) appetite -> fat -> diet.
So now I live without Gmail, Google maps, and this and that other thing, but I'm happier.
And I don't care what IBM says.
I own an independent True Value hardware store and for the past three years we've been building a customer loyalty program (True Value Rewards, developed by True Value and Insight Out of Chaos). This allows us to avoid the expense and waste of mass media (newspapers, radio, and direct mail flyers) and instead directly mail targeted pieces to our top customers. Some of the big retailers have started to adopt loyalty programs (Tesco is a prime example) and it will be interesting to see if Target, Home Depot, Wal*Mart and the other big box stores try their hand at loyalty marketing. The trick for them is they are product and price driven...mass purchase of product drives down cost so they can sell for lower prices and still have decent margins. Smaller retailers (like myself) offer local shopping, personal service, and now a "personal" touch via our loyalty program.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
What bugs me is that his is not a new concept; my father has worked in the radio industry for more than 40 years, he use to be an announcer but these days' works in marketing for one of the big stations down under. I remember him telling me even when i was little how when the salesmen sold ads they targeted the specific ad to a certain audience and income level. As the station was part of a larger network the salesman would go out sell a $50K advertising package and give the customer some broad details. And then come back and then tailor it to the right stations during the right programs etc so that the customer got what would maximise the effectiveness of the ads. Hell the big stations would deny advertisers because they didn't want there station too look tacky and instead run there ads on one of there FM music stations.
A boy can dream, can't he? Yeah, all ads ain't going away but we're a lot closer to doing away with many of them than we were before. I hate commercial radio due to the static playlists and advertising. Online radio lets me get varied content for free with minimal ads; if I pay, I can skip all ads. That's wonderful. Time was when you had to take the ads with the show if you wanted to watch it. The VCR let you skip the ads and now the DVD lets you buy the show directly and is making the possibility of direct-to-DVD distribution of quality first-run shows a real possibility.
Mass media as we know it is so last century -- it had to be big, bulky, and lowest common denominator because that's where the economies of scale lay. "Narrowcasting" was a buzzword that came about during speculation concerning internet video back during the original bubble but it's a buzzword that still means something. If your overhead is low enough, you can turn a reasonable profit catering to a niche, and probably with better margins than trying to broadcast to a larger audience, incurring greater overhead in the process. All of this ad shit we see is just a byproducy of the bygone age. The very first broadcasters realized that they needed something to pay the freight. Advertising became the be-all and end-all of public broadcasting and shows were little more than something to keep you tuned in between commercials. Some really fine art managed to be made in the process but the guys in the suits didn't give a shit, the ads were what captured their fancy.
Well, we can finally say "fuck the networks. Fuck the advertising-supported distribution medium." We've got the internet now and we have proven business models that allow for electronic distribution for a profit. People can directly support the shows they want to watch/listen to and there's no Neilsen ratings crap to deal with. It's clean, honest, and will put a lot of ad-men out of work. I couldn't be happier.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Flying cars! And a pony.
Advertising works because you pay attention to something you already know and it continue make you remembering the brand, or it show you something new and you memorize it. But if you are literally drowned in an advertising world, there is so much you can memorize, and either you will memorize only a few good one, or you will memorize negatively the worst one (some of the worst 80th ad showing women in general as dumbwitt blondy made me swear I will never buy from their brand, and yes it was a brand directed at my segment). What I mean is that with an overdosis of ad as we have today, they will be ineffective, and making more ad to appear on more place (OS, fridge, t shirt animated ad, aniamted ad in the U bahn etc...) will make it worse.
Now , for the last 3 years I had no tv, and for the last years I had flashblock, scriptblock, popunder/popover block. I also automatically skip any ad in the middle, not even paying attention of the content of the ad. I am in other word ad-starved. When I go to my friends & family and get a sample of ad from their tv, those have bigger effect on me because I never see ads.
That is food for thought for the marketing and advertiser : maybe a return to minimalism would mean a return to effectiveness....
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
So. Farewell then, Norman Mailer.
For a
wife
beating
drug addled crackpot
you wrote quite well.
Of your 8 children, I liked
CD
The best.
(Age 17 1/2)
and then craigslist demonstrates not advertising works better
Although the Ad industry might think otherwise, advertising isn't an end in itself, its purpose is to extend people's horizons beyond what they simply need (and will therefore seek out) to goods and services that they might want, or can be persuaded to want for as long as it takes the cash to leave their fingers.
We've always had "advertising" - markets existed to get people together not only for trading convenience but also to provide an audience for retail opportunities; shop windows have always been, well, "shop windows" to display goods to the passing masses. Itinerant peddlers would bring the foreign and unfamiliar to small local communities. Newspapers have featured advertising since their inception - indeed, the front page of The Times used to be where the announcements could be read - the news was on the inside.
The character of advertising opportunities do influence the kind of goods and services that can be developed, though. Not control, but influence - you'd be hard pressed to develop a mass-market brand without mass-market advertising. So if you can't put out a TV ad that hits 20 million people, there may be a change in the kind of businesses that exist. You might not have so many new global brands, no more international quasi-monopolies like Microsoft, for example. It might be bad news for the purveyors of overpriced, environmentally-harmful fizzy drinks and great for sales of lemonade from the front lawn. On the other hand, the cost of insurance has been driven down by direct insurers dealing with the public over the phone or internet and eliminating tiers of costly intermediaries: without mass advertising, people would use the insurance office in their local high street but pay more for the "privilege".
So "the end of advertising as we know it" isn't going to be the end of advertising, but it might well have an effect on the kind of new businesses that can be created - you can only have a business if you have a market and if the market can't be reached en masse then you might have to serve people individually as well as advertise to them individually. Which sounds great in principle, but doesn't come cheap.
I stopped listening to commercial radio, sold my T.V. and rarely go to the big cinemas because the content is rarely worthwhile and I can't bear the advertising.
I think the problem is deeper than people realize, it's not just the commercials causing interruptions in the program, or product placement appearing in the program, but it is the programs themselves altering content to appeal to what the advertisers feel that the viewers will find appealing.
The existing advertising model is severely flawed because the audience of television and radio is not the viewer or listener, but the advertiser. The advertiser wants lots of eyes on their product and does not want to be associated with ideas or values which might be controversial. The most obvious place this happened has been in newspapers and magazines.
I will stop reading articles online when interruption based advertising becomes commonplace. Not just because the dancing crap is distracting, but because the site skews its content dramatically to appeal to those advertisers.
1. Accept the fact that some percentage of your audience doesn't want to see advertising, ever. Accept this fact because: (a) they're a minority; (b) they're not going to buy your products based on advertising regardless; and (c) they're savvy consumers who can find you when they need you (they research before they buy) and will be more likely to do so if you're not pushy.
2. Advertising is now primarily a "pull" rather than "push" medium. The best promotion is one people will actually go to your website to see or actually look up on YouTube of their own initiative.
3. Your website and/or online store is your primary means of advertising yourself. Make it easy to use, make it easy to link to individual items inside, avoid flash, make it functional and have all the information I need, make it work with other websites and search engines, offer promotions for referrals, etc, and it'll spread through word of mouth.
4. When you do use traditional advertising make it targeted, subtle and relevant. Don't be a jerk.
For the first time in /. history an AC has a good point.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
I ignore them (are they banner ads or something?)
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