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.

Comments

Agreed

[timmarhy]

With the advent of PVR's and increasingly sofisticated adblocking software as well as do not call lists, there is a growing trend that people are sick to death of all the advertising in their lives.

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.

Advertisers will become more devious

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:Advertisers will become more devious

[pokerdad]

The technology already exists to almost completely avoid adverts.

As you point out yourself, its all about being devious, though I wonder from your choice of words if you recognize how much this is already going on. Obviously many of these deals are made away from the public eye, so you can only guess as to their existence, but if you watch closely there are clues; on a couple of my favourite shows I have noticed that anytime a character is using a computer it is a Dell, and since noticing this I have come to realise that a good clean shot of the Dell logo occurs at least once per episode.

Your point about the MS patent makes me wonder if the difference between home and business versions of the next MS OS will be ads vs no-ads.

press release

[statemachine]

And submitted by tech.luver, who is racing with ponca down the the bottom of the pit where roland lives.

All these people want to do is promote their blogs. If /. would not directly link these people's names to any other website than /. these people will go away.

And IBM finally noticed the obvious.

[loftwyr]

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.

Re:And IBM finally noticed the obvious.

[Ox0065]

Google are among a very few groups who consistently manage to place well targeted adds in front of me.
Sometimes the degree to which they are successfully targeted gets a little scary...

One of the others is IBM. They really are very good at it. They suddenly made a MASSIVE improvement from my perspective about six months after Steve Jobs declared PowerPC dead. IBM went from silent antiquated zero to cutting edge reliable voice of reason. Would anyone care to compare dates?

I think what this is saying is more like:
"This has really been working for us. If you aren't selling us advertising like this, you can stop wasting everyone's time"

and now you know.

The only interaction I want with advertising...

[analog_line]

...is stopping it dead in its tracks. And as far as targetted ads go, I prefer targetting ads before they can target me.

How much would you pay for TV?

[yotto]

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.

As users get more choice, advrters must get bolder

[backslashdot]

As users get more choice, advertisers must get bolder. Why? Because people are unaware of products and services.

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 .. 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.

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 .. but it's easier just having a domain name and being able to block emails getting sent to a particular adress.

So for example lets say slashdot was my domain .. 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.

Note, I am not against advertising .. I click on web ads if they inform me of inventive stuff I could really use.

Some insight for the advertisers

[Iphtashu Fitz]

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.

Re:Some insight for the advertisers

[daddyrief]

Great ad placement, ABC shill ;)

Re:The solution is simple

[dnixon112]

I guess you owe CowboyNeal a punch in the face for having the audacity to run an advertising driven website.

Or make people WANT to watch them.

[SanityInAnarchy]

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.

Re:The solution is simple

[pyrrhonist]

Really, the solution is simple and it's in our very hands. If you can put on a pair of gloves,

I agree with you completely. Also, if you can put on a pair of gloves, why not Isotoner gloves to Ease pain and swelling (tm)?

or wear a watch without it falling onto the ground as you walk, you have the tools to stop this sort of crap.

Not to worry! If you buy a Timex, you can rest assured that it takes a licking and keeps on ticking (tm)!

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.

How about a nice Hawaiian Punch? (tm)

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.

That's why I always choose to carry the American Express Card. If someone takes it, I have the peace of mind that any unauthorized purchases are completely refundable. Membership has its privileges (tm).

On top of that, in every waking moment - from the minute you get up and put on your clothes or make your breakfast

And what makes a breakfast complete? Kellogs Raisin Bran, of course! There's two scoops in every box (tm). Delicious!

to the second you turn out the light at night - in a million different little ways, it impinges on your mental environment.

I hate it when too much light impinges on me when it's time to go to bed. That's why I use The Clapper to turn out the lights. Clap On, Clap Off, The Clapper (tm)!

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.

And what better way to cool those air molecules than with an award winning air conditioner from Trane? It's hard to stop a Trane (tm).

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...

Need to stop hurting fast? Extra Strength Excedrin's combination of acetaminophen, aspirin, and caffeine starts working in just 15 minutes! The pain stops. You don't (tm).

You've been reading Slashdot.
Slashdot is supported by grants from these corporations and from viewers like you.

Re:"predicts"?

[Attila Dimedici]

IBM predicted that world demand would be satisfied with five computers. They also thought there would be no harm in outsourcing operating systems. No profit there after all. Right?

If IBM told me the sun was going to rise tomorrow, I'd get a tarot reading just to be sure.

Two points. First it is Thomas J. Watson who it is claimed said that the world would never need more than five computers. The best evidence is that he never said it. It appears that this is a mis attribution of a misquote of a different computer experthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson. Second, the reason that IBM outsourced the operating system for the first PC is because they were in the middle of a protracted and difficult antitrust lawsuit by the Justice Department. If they had developed the OS in house as an IBM proprietary product, it would have led to significant further complications of a court case where there was reason to believe that the Justice Department was going to do to them what it had done to AT&T only a couple years previously--break them up into multiple companies.

How about the end of advertising?

[jollyreaper]

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.