Usable Clicks

7 Minutes to Reinvent the Internet (for Advertising)

Yesterday afternoon I attended an interesting presentation & discussion session hosted by VideoEgg around the idea “7 Minutes to Reinvent the Internet for Advertising.”  7 highly credible engaging speakers were each given 7  minutes each to speak free form on how they believe the advertising industry & related businesses need to reinvent themselves to see success moving forward.  The presenters came at the challenge with different perspectives, likely due to their varied backgrounds (agency, technology, analyst), though a few common themes emerged.

The most interesting theme to me may have been the emerging understanding of the factors that make advertising online such a different beast from traditional media.  Several speakers discussed the clear shared dynamic advertising and media had in traditional forms.  Television, for example, is a full video platform, and a small break in time with what the consumer is watching for another video segment is a natural transition.  Print news as an informative piece even managed to turn advertising into something consumers actively perused for learning about new purchase and sales opportunities.  The Internet, on the other hand, has evolved into a life platform.   Most of the time, users aren’t in the right frame of mind where they are at all receptive to advertising, and they aren’t interacting with content in a way that allows messaging to be digested properly.  Advertisers need to understand this new environment and their audience within, and properly engage the consumer  with respect to the different need states that form in the digital sphere.

In conjunction with the consumer mindset, there was conversation about the consumer now being equal with the brand, forcing the brand to reach out to the consumer as a partner and share in the responsiblity of building a useful and successful product.  Since this has been discussed before, I’ll leave the insights in the notes below.

There is one more area I’d like to touch on specifically.  Two speakers laid out evolutionary models for the creation and selling of media on the web.  Troy Young, the CEO of VideoEgg, proposed the idea of a “People Markup Language”, which is essentially the idea of integrating content, historical data, and advertising through API’s to create a more personalized and valuable user experience for the consumer digesting the digital creative.  His entire speech was energetic and unique, and it’s worth watching when VideoEgg eventually posts the archives on their site.  In terms of purchasing the media, a separate speaker pressed the need to evolve the currency of the web from CPM and impressions to increments of time.  His rational was straight forward: Time with messaging is all that matters (versus impressions), time is what advertisers and content producers earn, and time is what consumers value most.   Both of these speakers laid down visions for moving forward, but the groundwork still needs to be done.

All in all, VideoEgg pulled together a great afternoon – the speakers and panelists were all interesting and dynamic.  It’s worth watching the videos of the 7 minute sessions when they’re up – but in the mean time, browse through my notes below for further thought starters.  I’ll leave you with the 1-liner that stuck with me the most:

“Consumer shouldn’t have to waste time on the uninteresting, and advertisers shouldn’t have to waste time on the disinterested”

My notes via Twitter, posted yesterday during the panel:

• Old media had obvious forms of creative content for advertising 
• Hyperlinking is allowing fragmentation and disjointed paths on the web
• We are at the point of impression ubiquity
• People Markup Language would be the science of integrating content, historical data, and advertising through data and APIs to enhance UX
• Crowdsourcing advertising can leverage mass creativity
• Connect your brand with useful attributes that the audience values 
• The digital life equalizes roles, a dissident characteristic from the underlying reality of life that has heirarchy
• Consumer shouldn’t have to waste time on the uninteresting, and advertisers shouldn’t have to waste time on the disinterested
• Reinvent context, connection, and currency for advertising
• Just because you can reach someone doesn’t mean you should. Most of the internet isn’t a viable ad platform
• Think of Maslow’s levels of emotion and need states, what are the mind states? When and how is your audience receptive?
• Time should be the currency of the web, time is what everyone earns from the consumer, its what we value most
• Time instead of reach and impressions as the currency of the web 
• When consumers share things its because they like their friends, not your brand
• Gaping Void comic: if we spoke to each other the way advertising speaks to us (shouting) we’d get punched in the face
• Current model of products and advertising is “willy wonka, behind the closed door”
• The new model is “look ma no fence”, companies concentrating on embracing consumers for ideas, feedback, wants, uses, visions… 
• Brands need personalities, need to show that they want to drive the value of the relationship up, in ways important to the consumer
• Why is marketing an expense and not an asset?
• Pascal quote: people choose with their hearts, and then they do the math to justify their decision
• The Internet has decoupled the symbiotic relationship of media and advertising
• Long tail has reduced the value of any specific content, reducing the ad rev earning opportunity, starting a downward funnel on creation