The Web will one-day eclipse television as the dominant medium for advertising, but we’re not there yet. The spirit of generosity that inspired Tim Berners-Lee to share his creation with the Whole Wide World made the Web quite a different place than the world of television. The model of free goods, services and content suggested by authors such as Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson in his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, and so intrinsic to the Web, has changed the way our economy operates. In this environment, it can be a challenge for brands to promote paid services.
The recent rise of social media offers the most promising opportunity we’ve seen for brands to promote their services. But the challenge remains of how to enter the space in a way that is not invasive. Fortunately, we may finally have the tools to make it accessible to brands on a grand scale.
Evolution on the Web has always required not just great ideas but the technologies to make them accessible. There’s a reason we talk about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, WordPress, Google, eBay, Cisco and not Yadayada, Flooz, Kozmo, Excite, Pseudo, and Ritmoteca. We also talk about HTML, TCP/IP, Flash, Javascript, Gif, etc. That’s because the first group of names would mean nothing to us without their accompanying technologies.
Source: http://davidbradford.blogspot.com/2008/12/web-technology-trends-for-2009.html
When Berners-Lee first proposed a system for sharing information among researchers at the European organization For Nuclear research (CERN), the Web was still ten years off. It took HTML to make it possible for a larger group of people to translate images, text and other material into viewable Web pages. Google became ubiquitous only because Brin and Page’s algorithm made search more relevant to masses of users. eBay took off only when Pierre Omidyar wrote computer code that made online trading accessible to anyone. Flash transformed the Web into a platform for rich, interactive media that created the potential for advertisers to participate.
Flash and the Challenges of Web Advertising
Flash was one of the first programs to use the growing ubiquity of the Web to put content creation tools into the hands of a broad base of developers. Originally conceived by as a sketch program by John Gay, Flash is now used by hundreds of thousands of developers to create animation, videos, games, podcasts and other rich media that are now played using the program by just about everyone in the world who uses a computer to browse the Web.
As a result of all these advancements, users themselves now participate in the creation of content and take for granted their ability to perform tasks which not very long ago would have been the exclusive domain of television broadcasters, newspaper editors, stock analysts and Fortune 500 companies. The result has been a mass influx of new content and interactivity from all corners.
With all this democratization taking place, businesses in general and media companies in particular, are still trying to find their place. The rise of Facebook has presented a particularly tantalizing challenge. Facebook revolutionized the Web by creating a technology, the Graph API, to advance the paradigm for content sharing and make it easy for users to share rich media content like videos, photos, and music with friends and followers. But it wasn’t until they introduced Fan Pages that these advances became relevant to brands by allowing them to make their content searchable across the Web. While different from traditional advertising, Facebook Fan Page interaction represents the model brands have been looking for to fully realize the Web’s potential as an advertising platform.
Brands started out on the Web doing pretty much what they did in print media, placing ads in publications, in the hope that readers might click on them to learn about or purchase their products. Unfortunately, this format never proved to be very robust for creating leads. The effectiveness of banner ads on the Web is measured in click-throughs, which still regularly take the user out of the experience they came for and is why people find them annoying.
Google Adwords is a form of advertising that has been more successful. While more relevant contextually, these are also defined by click rate, which is how Google makes its money. What’s missing from both of these formats, especially in the context of social media, is the potential to create engagement. Engagement is the biggest opportunity that social media has to offer brands, and the thing display and text ad formats have not been able to achieve in the context of the Social Web.
Apps Not Ads
Instead of trying to overlay the space with messaging that might not be relevant to the user, it’s important to look at the criteria that have driven the success of social Web experiences. While a display ad format is typically a static jpeg image of certain standard dimensions, a social media ad works better as an application. Social media ads are less about images and copy and more about the interactions they encourage. What makes Facebook so effective is that it puts the user at the center of the experience.
Brands are able to participate when they create or host applications that encourage users to consume, share and even create their own content. When users choose to interact they are also buying into the fact that they are interacting with and on behalf of the brand. Instead of being inserted into the experience, as with television or print, the ad is the experience and vice-versa. Brands can gain loyal followers, advocates and buyers to the extent they create fun, positive and engaging application experiences. The challenge right now to implementing these attributes is that the kinds of applications we’re talking about, which leverage disparate technologies to produce the kinds of multi media experiences we see on Facebook, are difficult to produce.
There is a movement to make the creation of social experiences more accessible from a development perspective. There are really two approaches that dominate the marketplace currently, the first is to create visual authoring tools and the second is to create programming languages. Fair disclosure, my company Involver has taken the latter approach. At Involver, we’ve focused our efforts on the creation of a Social Markup Language (SML) that makes these formats more accessible to front-end developers. SML is a markup language (like HTML) that makes it simple to build customized applications on platforms like Facebook and across the open-web.
By effectively removing the barriers that have inhibited brands and agencies from entering this market, we believe spending by brands and agencies on digital media in general and applications in particular will continue to grow perhaps even faster than current predictions.
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