Deep Media

Who's really to blame for online ad-blocking? (Hint: It's not the users)

Last week I came across one of the more extreme commentaries on advertising I've ever encountered. Appearing on MediaPost, it was a diatribe about ad-blocking aimed squarely at Randall Rothenberg, the head of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, who is allegedly responsible for letting this scourge grow to its current malignant state. But what really got my attention was this passage, near the top: 

Ad-blockers have given consumers a voice in the online ad world — and that voice is loud, it is clear and it is filled with venom.

Track our behavior without our consent and serve “targeted” ads that make us feel stalked. —Block you.

Serve us ads that cover up the inferior content we read mostly to kill time. —Block you.

Force auto-play video ads down our throats, so we have to race to find our mute button. —Block you.

Serve us flashy ads that slow down the page load. —Block you.

Allow anyone to buy ads through exchanges, so our computers get infected with malware. —Block you.

Serve us too many damn ads on a single page of content. —Block you.

Ad-blocking could cost Web publishers nearly $11 billion this year, according to a report from Adobe and PageFair.

In fact, the IAB has a de­tailed code of con­duct for its mem­bers, though that obvi­ously hasn't fixed the prob­lem. But Ran­dy—whom (full dis­clo­sure) I've known for years, and who gave me a lovel­y blurb for my most re­cent book—does­n't really need me to de­fend him. The point is that the sins list­ed here—online stalk­ing, auto-play vid­eos, mal­ware in­fes­tations, ram­pant clut­ter, and so on—have be­come ubiq­ui­tous, and they're al­most guar­an­teed to make con­sum­ers ven­omous. They cer­tainly make me feel ven­omous. And as the au­thor of this post was try­ing to point out, they make a ter­rific case for ad-block­ing. 

 

What if TV networks themselves go over the top?

For years, people have been speculating about the day when viewers would go "over the top," cutting their cable or satellite connections and getting TV online. It hasn't really happened, since even with Hulu and Netflix, there was no viable Internet alternative—no way to watch Girls or Game of Thrones, for example, because HBO Go is only available to people who get HBO through cable or satellite. The first suggestion that this might be changing came last summer, when a top analyst, Craig Moffett, reported that US cable and satellite companies lost more than 300,000 subscribers between June 2012 and June 2013. But in the past two weeks, it's started to look as if the television networks themselves might cut the cord: 

• Two weeks ago, on March 3, Disney—which owns ABC and ESPN—announced a deal with Dish Networks to offer its programming via Internet, not just to Dish's satellite sub­scribers but as part of a separate, over-the-top subscription service. As part of the deal, Disney agreed to let Dish deploy its AutoHop ad-skipping feature on shows three days after they're broadcast. Disney had been suing Dish over AutoHop; now the litigation has been settled, leaving CBS, NBC, and Fox to cut their own deals. The three-day window protects the Disney-owned channels during the period advertisers are actually paying for. Still, as Michael Wolff observed, "Finally, a major network has bent to the obvious—people expect to be able to skip ads." His conclusion? "The sky is falling." 
• A couple of days later in the UK, the BBC announced its intention to stop broadcasting BBC Three—the digital channel whose shows include Being Human, the series that inspired the Canadian remake that's shown in the US on Syfy—and relaunch it online. This was billed as a cost-cutting move, but it makes sense for a channel whose target audience is people 16 to 34. 
• Last Tuesday, the head of CBS, Leslie Moonves, threatened to take his own network over the top if the networks lose their court battle against Aereo, the startup that wants to stream broadcast channels to subscribers without paying the channels. "If the government wants to give them permission to steal our signal, then we will come up with some other way to get them our content and so get paid for it," he told CNET, the CBS-owned online news service.

C21 author learns to make pineapple with readers

A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk at ad:tech Sydney that got written up in a blog post on MarketingDirecto.com, a Madrid-based marketing and publicity site. My Spanish is not so great, but with a little help from Google Translate I could see that their correspondent had gotten my point—that brand marketers need to stop trumpeting their message and start enlisting the consumer to spread it for them. It was the headline that threw me: “Para contar historias, las marcas deben hacer piña con el consumidor”—which Google rather unhelpfully translated as, "To tell stories, brands must make pineapple with the consumer."

Funny—I couldn't remember saying anything resembling that. 

Engagement: Is TV finally ready for a new metric?

Late last month I got an advance look at the new IPG Media Lab, recently relocated from LA to New York and sporting all manner of flashy tech displays. Where the LA lab was essentially a connected-home display designed to show marketers how people are actually consuming media today, as opposed to five or ten years ago, the New York lab is all about future possibilities and the tech­nologies that enable them. There's GazeHawk, which uses Webcams to do eye-tracking studies. There's TruMedia's iCapture, an "audience measurement solution" that computes the age, sex, and interest level of people looking at in-store displays. Affectiva, whose "Affdex expression tracker" watches shoppers through a tiny camera tucked under the shelf and measures their emotional response to the products thereon. And then there's Trendrr—"a company we love," says Chad Stoller, the lab's managing partner.

Trendrr sifts through social media commentary to gauge the engagement level of people watching TV. This is a potentially revolutionary development—for advertisers, for viewers, for television itself. 

Brand empathy: How mirror neurons can reduce the gap between brand and self

Contagious Magazine, the London-based quarterly, is the most seductively gorgeous marketing publication around, and remarkably insightful in the bargain. So when production editor Emily Hare and North American editor Nick Parish said they wanted to run an essay based on The Art of Immersion's discussion of the role of empathy in advertising, I was more than happy to pull something together. This is the piece that resulted, from the current issue of Contagious: 

In the early 1990s, long before social networking existed on the web – almost before the web itself existed, in fact – a monkey in Italy made a wholly unexpected contribution to our future under-standing of the phenomenon of empathy. The monkey, which was part of an experiment in a neuroscience lab at the University of Parma, was watching a research assistant eat an ice cream cone. Because the scientists were trying to map the part of monkey brains involved in rehearsing things, the animal had needles in its head – needles so thin they had been implanted in individual neurons. As the lab assistant lifted the cone to his lips, one of the researchers noticed a particular neuron lighting up in the monkey’s brain – the same neuron that would have lit up if the monkey itself had made such a motion. The scientists tried putting a piece of food on a table, taking it off the table, taking it from another researcher’s hand, each time with the identical result: the same neurons that fired when the monkey did something also fired when the monkey watched a person doing it.

 

What happens when ads and entertainment meet

The UK edition of Wired launched a new Ideas Bank section with its May issue and invited me to contribute something from The Art of Immersion. Working with editor-in-chief David Rowan, the former Guardian editor who has headed the magazine since it launched in 2009, I decided to do a short take on the blur between entertainment and advertising—one of the major themes of the book. The piece is not yet available on the Wired UK Web site, but you can read it here: 

For most of its 72 years, Batman has existed as a series of comics that followed well-defined rules of narrative and graphic art. It stayed within the lines. You could pick it up at will, secure in the knowledge that it wouldn’t bleed into your life. Eventually it moved to television and then to the movies, but it didn’t jump the screen—until The Dark Knight. Then, for the first time in the annals of cartoon superheroes, the rules of narrative were redrawn to bring fans into the story during the lead-up to the movie’s release.

Months before its premiere, for example, several thou­sand people who had applied online to become the Joker’s henchman received a cryptic email that led to a Web site that in turn directed them to bakeries across the US. The first person to reach each bakery received a cake with a phone number and the words “Call Me Now” written in icing. When they called, the cake itself started ringing, setting them off on an elaborate caper that ended with them helping steal a school bus to serve as the Joker’s getaway vehicle.

Will the 10 best digital ad campaigns of the decade please stand up?

I suspect the real reason the ad industry is so diligent about giving awards to itself is that with other metrics so dubious, a shiny peer-bestowed thingamabob is the one measure of success nobody can argue with. Yet the gala the One Club threw in celebration of the past Digital Decade at the Museum of Modern Art last night was an apotheosis of sorts: the culmination of a period of online experimentation that began with buttons and banners and ended with some highly sophisticated platforms for brand participation. So the results, first announced at the end of November, were actually quite instructive. 

The One Club has been around for more decades than there've been digits, which explains why the awards it gives out are all pencils. But the story its ten-best list tells is one of a still-emerging grammar of engagement that shows a remarkable evolution in the industry's thinking—and a long way yet to go. 

Ad sense? Googlenomics and the tyranny of click-through

The June issue of Wired has a provocative piece by my colleague Steven Levy on Googlenomics—that is, Google's extraordinary success at transforming the ad business from the martini-fueled ego bash portrayed in Mad Men to the highly automated, algorithmic exercise that is search advertising today. But the story only glancingly addresses the connection between Googlenomics and the overall state of online advertising, which is not healthy. Advertising, virtually all of it search-related, brought Google more than $21 billion in revenue last year, accounting for 97 percent of the company's gross income (and funding, among many other things, the phenomenal money pit that is YouTube). In the US, Google search advertising—almost all of it priced on a cost-per-click basis—accounted for close to 45 percent of the total Internet ad-revenue tally reported by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. 

The Google model assumes that if your ad isn’t clicked on, it’s worthless—and in the case of the short text ads Google places next to search results, that's pretty close to true. But what about everything else? Search-related advertising does little or nothing to build a brand, but online video and display ads are devalued because they don't generate comparable click-through rates. Web video accounted for just 3 percent of the money spent last year on online advertising, according to the IAB. There are a number of reasons, but the key one is this: Ad people tend to buy what they can measure. Yet for brand advertising, click-throughs offer a measure of engagement that's as seductive as it is meaningless. And as a result, brand advertising is languishing on the Web.