(or How we are learning to
love personalisation)
If
advertisers are going to be part of the conversation, will we let them in? What
would make us do so? and once they are in the conversation how can they add
value to that conversation, or are they there just to extract value through
sales? If so, will it be a short term visit to the conversation?
But
social networking creates an opportunity for advertisers to eavesdrop a
conversation as well as take part of it. That creates a difficulty for all of us in that the things that we
communicate about are seen by those who are silent. Silent but not inactive. They are reading and assimilating the
knowledge they gain in order to be able to better position their products and
services for us. That’s no bad thing,
for, if we are approached for the things we need at the time we need them with
a product or service that meets that need and is good value then none of us
will complain. The question is can they
be good enough at acquiring this skill?
The development of
internet advertising
The
first type of advertising on the internet was display adverts or banner
adverts, usually in the form of large graphical boxes on the webpage. Something that we are used to seeing on
websites like Ecademy (www.ecademy.com). The rise of streaming websites both for audio and video such as YouTube
and Google Video have enabled advertisers to be more viral in their efforts to
attract our attention. Creating a great
advert means that many social networking people will share and embed the video
in many places creating far greater reach than the advertisers could have
expected without the social networking phenomenon.
Examples
of this include the Cadbury’s Dairy Milk gorilla playing the drums to a Phil
Collins song. In addition advertising is
going inline as well as online and many classified ads now only appear on the
online world sometimes embedded (inline) in the text of website. Large advertising companies (e.g. Google) are
becoming every smarter at interpreting words on web pages and integrating links
even when the links were not conceived at the time of writing by the author. In addition search advertising has grown
dramatically. Google ad words are
appearing on many sites and the revenue sharing models they have developed
encourage many people to incorporate advertising on their websites for a share
of the revenue that is generated as a result.
The impact on
advertisers
Many
advertising agencies, particularly the smaller ones, are having to become much
more savvy very quickly and some are merging and others collapsing as
advertising revenue moves from traditional means on paper to magazines and on
television to alternative multi media means in which social networking sites
like Facebook and MySpace play a critical role.
Brands
are now joining the social networking revolution creating profile pages from
individuals within the companies and as the companies themselves. On MySpace film companies have been creating
profiles and identities for films and the characters in them and accepting friend’s
requests from other users creating communities around their product, the film. As
the film develops in the offline world at the cinema and the word spreads more
people are drawn to the persona of that film in the social networking
environment also becoming friends and therefore becoming targets for
advertising when the DVD is released. With the millions involved in MySpace the effort required to create that
route to market seems to be worth it. Facebook announced this week that it would allow brands to create their
own pages Coca Cola has a Sprite page (http://www.facebook.com/spritesips) along with games related to the drink. – For
those without a Facebook account the main site is here: http://www.obeyyourthirst.co.uk/ - but in Facebook you can now be a Sprite fan. It's visual brand advocacy.
The
viral marketing impact of Facebook and its newsfeeds means that anyone who
signs up to this page is immediately broadcasting the fact that they have done
so to their friends through the newsfeeds on Facebook, that naturally attracts
in more people, more friends, more people, more friends. Facebook has also announced an intention to integrate
the activity of members on other sites into those news feeds where permission
has been given. That means that over
time almost all of your activity on the web could be being announced in news
feeds within Facebook to your friends. Advertisers love it. When you
purchase a new pair of shoes and your friends are aware that you’ve been
purchasing shoes a manufacturer of shoe protection products might well start
feeding you information in relation to waterproofing or polishing the item that
you have just bought. A trivial example,
that one that indicates that our activity on-line is becoming much more a
conversation than a transaction.
One
thing is certain, the face of advertising is changing. The need for more contextual advertising is
clear and the willingness of brands and businesses to engage at the
conversation in a social networking environment is becoming more
paramount. I think that means that we
will see more businesses and brands seeking to join sites like Ecademy where
the conversation is more business focused. Especially where brands are in the business to business rather than
business to consumer markets. I wonder
what that means for advertising on Ecademy, for their own advertising revenue
generation models, and the impact that it has on us, the members. Time will tell, and I suspect quite soon.
The key to effective advertising is creating an ad that is engaging, whether its an interactive widget ad, or something so hilarious that you HAVE to click through. Engagement will only stimulate the viral-ness of an ad, once people start sending it to their friends.... www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?RTA=web2
Posted by: Jeff | August 04, 2008 at 06:59 PM