How interactive agencies could win the battle for brand stewardship.

“18 months from now, ask yourself what you think of repurposing 30-second TV in web advertising and see if you feel the same way”, I exclaimed to Joseph Jaffe (author of Life After The 30-Second Spot) at the Battle For The Heart conference a couple of years ago.

The statement was in response to Unicast’s new polite streaming video technology for use in mass online advertising. Unicast and Joseph were praising its ability to facilitate existing creative assets for marketers.

“Have we all forgotten the words from our interactive elders… lean forward and lean back - the definition of why online content consumption is different than broadcast.”

These words are even more profound today than they were a decade ago. Now they are proven. Shoving passive messages in front of consumers in whatever format – video or otherwise - is a losing battle to win their loyalty and patronage. Banner effectiveness is plummeting every year with no sight of bottom. And no wonder. Marketers are using the same tactics in banner ads as with TV. When was the last time a banner ad made you cry?

During this same time, Tom Beeby, Executive Creative Director at Modem Media wrote in his article, Broadband Marketing: Are You Missing the Boat? - “Placing your TV spots online is a compelling reason to increase online spending as part of your mix.”

Compelling to whom? And why? Because it saves money on creative?

TV ads on the web? At this point, the interactive agencies have lost their leverage to their traditional counterparts. The intellectual and lifestyle insight, vision and fresh thinking that drives marketers to use interactive agencies is lost in the repurposing of a methodology that is completely inappropriate for the medium.

But what about all of those marketing dollars coming our way?
Since early ’04, marketers have been migrating larger portions of their marketing dollars from traditional to new media. Duh. And interactive shops have been gladly accepting those dollars and buying more online banner space and pushing out “integrated” marketing messages. Now in mid-’06, even more money is flowing to interactive shops to solve the advertising needs traditional media can’t. So what’s the problem?

Traditional branding agencies aren’t going to sit back and allow more and more of their piece of the pie get eaten away. They are going to continue building out their own interactive resources (OgilvyOne) or purchasing existing shops (EVB by OmniComm). In order for interactive agencies to continue managing growing marketing budgets they have to offer what the traditional guys can’t - a profound insight into the lean forward state of mind that consumers are in while engaged on the web. We can’t offer repurposed TV and larger banner media space as our answer.

Brands are no longer explained in 30 seconds. Brands are stories and those stories can build a fanatical religious following if delivered in a fashion that connects with consumer’s state of mind.

MediaWeek just reported on a study done by The Atlas Institute, a division of aQuantive.
“The conventional wisdom regarding video ad length in new media is wrong. Longer is actually better.” The study continues, “That flies in the face of most of the industry's thinking… many brands have been repurposing their existing 30-second TV spots for these platforms, the consensus has been that 15, 10, or even five-second ads would become the norm down the road, as advertisers work to capture the short attention spans
common to these media.”

The interactive agencies can become the immersive storytellers for today’s brands and thus become the stewards of those brands. Interactive agencies have a unique insight into lifestyles on the web, not just web trends. Interactive agencies can evolve into more than just brand messengers but real content creators. Consumers will follow these stories as long as there is a story arc that will carry their interests.


More to come…