Here’s a prediction. Expect online advertising to increasingly resemble television commercials. Soon there won’t be too much difference between an advert you see on your box and an advert you see on a website you happen to be visiting. They may even be one and the same thing.
As web technology and broadband advances, so advertisers and their agencies are increasingly deploying rich media to funk up their online campaigns. Rich media means smoother, silkier online ads that make use of animation, video and audio to deliver the message. It means online adverts should increasingly become whiz-bang multimedia experiences – a far cry from the rigid, epileptic animated gif ads of the early web.
So imagine you are reading a news article and the adjacent advert block bursts into life with sound and a short video animation of the latest car to hit our shores. In a sense, it’s no different from adverts placed around newspaper or magazine articles – except these ones come alive. You could watch the advert, you could interact with the advert – and if the advert is not for you, you should even be able to switch it off.
International research house Jupiter Media says rich media adverts will account for half of all online ad impressions in the US by 2009. In South Africa’s challenged bandwidth environment, we may not immediately see an impact as big as that. But we are starting to see hints of what is to come on the local web. A tiny handful of advertisers have experimented cautiously with video and sound in their online campaigns – even while fighting against bandwidth constraints.
Andrea Mitchell, a media director at Acceleration, says she is starting to see increasing demand from advertisers for “something different”.
“Advertisers want to stand out, and as the online advertising spend in SA increases, so too will the demand for ‘prime’ space. Rich media can certainly help alleviate this demand.”
Mitchell acknowledges that local take-up has been slow because of squeezed bandwidth. However, she emphasises that with the imminent arrival of the second fixed-line telecoms operator the demand is likely to increase.
“We will hopefully see a very different SA online landscape – one that includes innovative and creative ideas coming into play, with a substantial increase in online ad spend to back it up.”
Some argue that this form of advertising will irritate online users – who already have their knives out for online advertising as it encroaches on content space. It’s a particularly sensitive issue on the web because adverts add to download time and are often seen as an intrusion.
I’m not sure what the fuss is about – like many new things, there is always a period of initial resistance before eventual acceptance. It was probably no different when commercial breaks were first introduced during TV movies. In any case, in the high-bandwidth environment of the future, the extra download time of online advertising will be negligible. Also, as Mitchell points out, it is possible to detect connection speeds and serve rich media ads to only those users with sufficient bandwidth.
Some major online US publications have used rich media ads as interstitial adverts – the ad shows before a user reads the article. It’s a form of linear advertising similar to TV, where a viewer watches an ad before or after they watch a show – not the traditional form of online advertising, which happens at the same time an article is read. This form of advertising is hardly used at all in South Africa, but has been successfully deployed by major US online publications such as Salon.com and the New York Times.
Whether the ads appear before you read an article or at the same time is up to the publisher and advertiser involved. Rich media will make online advertising that much more in-your-face, but it probably won’t raise too much ire from users because these sophisticated ads should be a whole lot more pleasurable to watch. That’s my guess.
Matthew Buckland publisher of the Mail & Guardian Online @ www.mg.co.za