Text is not Dead

I love the show Lost; I’m actually experiencing night sweats in anticipation for the next and final season. I am not alone. Nine million people were glued to their televisions for the finale of season five. Something I’ve noticed about the show is the sneaky nature of the advertising during broadcast. Years ago, shows had built-in cues for the regularly timed commercials. An audience could almost smell them coming. And, years before that, the audience was used to hearing, “and now for a word from our sponsors.” TiVo hasn’t only changed the lifestyle of the individual viewer: it’s changed the entire life of advertising. In turn, advertising has become a bit more creative. Two minutes into a Lost episode, usually a very intense two minutes, a 30-second commercial will appear. Before the viewer even realizes it, half the commercial has passed, and it becomes futile to fast-forward through it. A similar thing happens toward the end of the episode when the viewer is so attentive to the suspenseful action that fast-forwarding and risking missing a second is out of the question.

In spite of sneaky maneuvers such as these on the part of television advertising, Internet advertising now holds the power. Mark Buchanan, writer of The Social Atom, discusses the evolution of Internet algorithmic advertising.

Web search was revolutionized by the

href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank”>PageRank algorithm, which makes vclculations on the entire network of linked pages in order to assign an “importance” to any one page. In the case of advertising, you can imagine an abstract network, where the links correspond to a trio of 1) user (the consumer), 2) the context (the web page) and 3) the advertisement. Based on historical data (which a company like Yahoo! can collect at the level of something like 10^12 points) you can (in principle) build this graph, adding edges for each trio where something positive happened (a click through). Then use this data, and do network analysis to try to predict other trios where you’re likely to find success again.

The world of Internet advertising as a whole has eclipsed that of television. The notion of the captive audience is now associated with web pages and social networking sites. Instead of the importance of knowing who watches what shows, the industry pays attention to click-through rates, page rank, bounce pages, and even cookies, which act like electronic spies all-too eager to show advertisements based on what types of sites a person visits. The interesting thing about this form of advertising is that it’s not as disruptive as television ads. People don’t save their bathroom trips, quick conversation, or run to the kitchen for those times when a pop-up ad is on the computer screen. People have more control over the advertising they view or ignore, and this leads to immediate feedback for the industry- what’s working and what’s not, In the evolution of advertising. Alex Nesbit wrote about the panel discussion surrounding this topic, and the core idea that kept creeping to the surface of the conversation was interactive advertising.

What’s the future of the 30 second spot?
The 30 second spot is still an important marketing tools and will remain so into the future. As long as television is important spots like 30 second or 15 second ads will be important. Karen from Tivo says they can enhance the 30 second spot by making it interactive. Eric points out that the importance of TV will change for different segments as young males are using the Internet with increasing intensity on sites like Heavy.com. He says the key is to respecting the viewer and make the advertising relevant and engaging.

TiVo wants the industry of television advertising to succeed even though it is the element that did the worst damage. The New York Times has an article about the newest type of advertising for TiVo, the interactive commercial. Now, when a viewer pauses the show, a prompt appears inviting a commercial. Ads have even found their way onto the menu pages of TiVo. The same particular ad will sit on the main TiVo screen for days until the person either watches it or in non-action communicates to the industry that he or she is not interested.

Seeing this back and forth over whether television or the Internet will hold the reigns of advertising has made me wonder about the future. Will handheld PDAs, Smartphones, and iPhones be the medium? For an instant in the advertising world, social networking sites were a great venue for ads. However, the click-through rate of Facebook is not what it once was because people aren’t as enamored with it anymore. We still use it, but we’re not on it for hours throwing sheep at each other and gifting drinks; we’re networking and socializing.
The captive audience is not the viewers of the last episode of Seinfield or when the world saw JR shot. The question is can we be captivated at all anymore.