This is the real beginning for interactive advertising: That’s what I believe. What we’ve seen so far has been like the early days of moving pictures, when marveling at those flickering shadowy images was fun enough, and the message was just the medium.
Now we’re going to see the kind of change that came over the movies in 1915 when D.W. Griffith made Birth of a Nation. After Griffith, it wasn’t, "Look what we can do" anymore—it was, "Let’s tell a story, think and talk together." For interactive advertising, too, the message, not the medium, will be the message.
Now it gets interesting. Up till now a whole confused mix of techies and consultants has been trying to create for this medium. But now the real creative communicators are going to step in and start to use this new channel properly to make it do what we want it to do. And the new model that is going to make this happen is, in fact, a familiar model. We’re going to see advertisers working with their traditional ad agencies—and agencies working with production companies—to make great interactive advertising just the way we’ve always made TV spots.
Those of us who’ve been riding the interactive roller coaster the past couple of years learned a lot about the Internet (and ourselves), and actually had quite a bit of fun in a "look what we can do" kind of way. We spent a few years living a fantasy of limitless promise and limitless capability. What we actually had was limitless hubris. Followed by a collapse.
But there is a silver lining for interactive advertising in this horrendous economic cloud we’ve been going through. The recession has forced both clients and agencies to cut costs. And in so doing, almost by accident, they have integrated their offline and online capabilities. This is having a profound effect on strategies and on creative planning and executions. We are getting the right results for the wrong reason, but at least we are getting them. This integration has forced the realization that interactive marketing works so much better when the creative is conceived as part of the whole campaign and works hand-in-glove with the other channels. With the creative work in all channels coming from a single point of view, the goal of truly effective cross-channel marketing is at last in sight.
So now the time-proven marketers have allocated a bigger slice of their advertising pie to interactive, and they are figuring out what to do with it. Their goals are clear and familiar: brand awareness, and customer acquisition and retention. (Wireless and iTV applications will follow the Web—but not yet.) They’re bringing their integrated online and offline creative strategies to their traditional agencies, who know how to work with them and know their businesses. It is the logical way for them to go. And they are free at last from the technicians’ equations and the consultants’ jargon.
One of the big things that was learned as we pushed our way past the obscurantists is, it’s not a wizard behind the Internet curtain—it’s a totally accessible and human way to communicate and converse with real people, responding to their interests, entertaining, sharing information and playing games with them. This presents a thrilling creative opportunity for the experienced advertising creatives who understand brands and know how to communicate. They can come up with ideas that will use this still-fresh medium and make it work.
In the next little while, interactive is where the really exciting creative stuff is going to be happening. This is where those of us who want to push the creative envelope should all want to be, learning how to talk with our customers, not just at them. We know how to make TV spots—that’s easy—but interactive: Now, that’s a juicy creative challenge!
How to bring these interactive ideas to life? For agencies and clients, producing in-house hasn’t worked. They couldn’t retain the best talent for the needs of each and every project. The niche Web-tech companies with no experience in branding and TV communications didn’t last. They developed some excellent technical solutions, but lacked communications skills.
To execute and produce the agencies’ interactive advertising ideas to their best potential, the old rule still applies: Get the best and most talented craftspeople for the job. The people who are good at crafting these communications have existed all along. They are the TV and film directors, and the designers, storytellers, composers, architects and technicians who have the talent and sensibility to bring the ideas to life in the best possible way. They know how to touch someone, they know what looks good and they understand changing fashions. They use language that can be understood and images that strike a chord.
So that’s the new, yet familiar, model: marketers, their traditional agency partners, and the creative production talent—just the same way it’s always been for TV spots.
The Internet hasn’t had its Birth of a Nation yet. As we let the experienced creators and the communicators loose, it soon will. And when that cat is out of the bag, interactive advertising will truly have come of age.
