Blogs on New Media Practices

The effects of scalable ad-serving systems such as Google AdSense and Yahoo!'s Y!PNO, while already making a considerable impact on online marketing, are in the earliest stages of changing the way that all companies look at marketing. Given the mass movement to distribute all types of content by market pull (search) rather than push (broadcasting) and the ability to gather information about and target specific users using scalable ad-serving technologies, advertising itself is in the midst of a marketing revolution which will affect all mediums. This has the potential to improve the efficacy across all of advertising and change the way companies' message to, and communicate with, their customers and clients, in the end shifting the entire market for the attention of consumers. This is particularly true with regards to the monetization of video content as online in-demand or DVR access becomes the dominant model for video consumption.

Market movement to content "pull"

Over the past couple of months, the discussion regarding convergence of the Internet and "traditional" media has reached a fever pitch. Perhaps the most important concept to understand, in what has been a avalanche of announcements, is that moving forward there will no longer be cable "channels" as defined today. Television as we know it will change forever, as will many broadcast type distribution models. Instead, content will be available for viewers to pull/search at anytime. Each of the major networks and studios has shown a bit of their strategy regarding this transition, with some even beginning to produce content for online distribution only. Granted, there will still be live events and groups of viewers who will choose to watch content as it becomes available, but overall this shift in content distribution will rely on the ability of consumers to search and organize available content. This shows why Comcast's CEO states that Comcast wants to be the "Google of Cable Companies", why Microsoft is investing in Xbox to be the home media cente, why Cisco bought the number one cable box maker, why Google and Yahoo! are racing to be the interface through which content (of all types) is discovered on the Internet, and why Microsoft's MSN Originals has begun to look at content creation as a possible key to organizational success

Content will no longer come in neat 30, 60 and 120 minute blocks with "insert here" slots for traditional advertising. Video content will not only be viewed on a home television, or PC monitor, but on a vast array of devices for which each may require different ad formats to best deliver the messages to end users. This does not decrease the need for a vast array of creative advertising inventory but rather increase the inventory of creative developed. The new model of content distribution will require more advertising inventory for a product or brand, with each ad tailored for delivery in real time that speaks to individual users based on attributes far exceeding the traditional demographic advertising model. Below is a simplified look at the differences/possibilities of targeted advertising in a content pull market:

The right ad for the right user, time, and medium

The focus of advertising is reaching the right audience, with the right message, at the right time. Overture made pay-per-click (PPC) famous, and this has been the platform for the extraordinary growth of search marketing and the first step in monetizing content on the Internet. But, much as advertising has only just begun to see the effect of Google, Yahoo!, and other ad serving innovators, PPC is only the first step in improving the efficiency of ads served to all users.

As Jason Calcanis of Weblogs Inc. states so clearly on his blog, "What I really hate with CPC [cost-per-click] and CPL [cost-per-lead] models is that when you embrace them you're saying that there is no value to the impression. That looking at an advertiser is worth nothing. I'll never accept that as a publisher. No one clicks on a billboard or magazine ad and people pay a lot of money for those." Google recognizes this, as they have focused recently on building image and brand ad inventory, and certainly companies wishing to promote brands as well as their advertising agencies, have long known this. What an ad serving system would do, in an ideal world, is display the most "relevant" or effective ad at any given point. Relevancy and effectiveness apply in this context not only to the content of the ad delivered to the users, but to the way in which that ad is monetized. Aligning the effectiveness of the ad served, for both the advertiser and publisher, is the ultimate goal of automated ad serving systems.