The Future of Advertising is Here
It's becoming increasingly possible to target "smart ads" specifically
to people who want them.
And best of all, you can do this for a fraction
of the price of mass-market.
By David H. Freedman
Andrew Fano
is showing off the living room. It's a plush, teaky, well-appointed
affair, but what really catch the eye are several thin-screen video
displays, including a few smaller ones that are embedded in furniture
and picture frames. The displays are slowly cycling through what appear
to be family digital photographs -- an appealing idea, considering many
of us let our thousands of digital photos sit unwatched on a computer
hard drive. "But would you want to see an ad stuck in there?" asks Fano,
indicating one of the digital slide shows, apparently of a family
vacation to a theme park. "No? Because you just saw one." One of the
theme-park photos was a professional image designed to "enhance your
memories" of the park, explains Fano, a senior researcher at consulting
giant Accenture
who is exploring new ways for advertisers to get their messages across.
The tony living room is actually part of Accenture's technology
laboratory, and the displays are an experimental prototype of a service
that would arrange your photos into slide shows in exchange for the
right to slip relevant sponsored pictures into the mix.
The world is awash in advertising clutter. For decades marketers have
been spending more and more to try to get their message out -- only to
find their pitches drowned out in a sea of noise generated by countless
other marketers trying to do the same thing. In effect, companies have
been paying big bucks to be ignored. Now, inspired by the Internet's
ability to do a better job of targeting prospects and measuring results,
advertisers are dreaming up new ways to break through the clutter and
connect with potential customers at a lower cost.
The big advances in advertising technology once favored traditional giants like Procter & Gamble, which could afford to mass-market its message. The new techniques are affordable to smaller companies, too.
Though the advertising revolution got started online, some of the new
techniques are already finding their way onto streets and walls and
even into clothing pockets around the world. Perhaps just five years
from now, companies will be able to routinely and inexpensively embark
on ad campaigns that hit exactly the right prospects -- and hardly
anyone else -- with entertaining, hard-to-ignore messages that can
follow people via new high-tech media into their cars, offices, living
rooms, and bedrooms. For companies that master the new techniques, the
payoff is potentially enormous: a big jump in customer mindshare while
holding the line on marketing costs. And whereas the big advances in
advertising technology once favored traditional giants like Procter
& Gamble, which could afford to mass-market its message, the new
techniques are affordable to smaller companies, too. "Over time," says Karen Breen Vogel,
CEO of ClearGauge, one of hundreds of interactive ad agencies that have
sprung up to focus on online advertising, "we can cut the cost of the
advertising in half while maintaining customer response."
Fixed in an archipelago of art galleries and airy cafes at the periphery of Chicago's
North Loop, the offices of ClearGauge have the hip, slightly subversive
look you'd expect of a boutique advertising agency. Except that where
the halls of other agencies regale visitors with blowups of their
all-important creative, ClearGauge has proudly plopped a wicked-looking
bank of servers front and center against the exposed concrete walls.
It's a tip-off to the agency's sensibilities -- and to a sea change in
the advertising industry.
Advertising has long been a sort of black art with a murky ROI, and
for a simple reason: Clients rarely know for sure who sees their ads,
let alone whether the ads influence anyone. Even though companies spend a
third of a trillion dollars a year on advertising, those ads often end
up being irrelevant to the people who see them. On average, Americans
are subject to some 3,000 essentially random pitches per day. Two-thirds
of people surveyed in a Yankelovich Partners
study said they feel "constantly bombarded" by ads, and 59% said the
ads they see have little or no relevance to them. No wonder so many
people dislike and ignore advertising, and so many business owners feel
gun-shy about investing in serious campaigns.
The Internet has begun to change all that. The ability to measure the
impact of an ad simply by counting how many people click on it, and to
link advertisements to search-engine results, in large part drove
Internet advertising to $9.6 billion in 2004, a 33% jump from 2003,
according to Interactive Advertising Bureau
reports. (For a cautionary tale about counting clicks, see "So Many
Clicks, So Few Sales," on page 29.) But the real advantage is going to
companies that figure out how to use these tools to hunt down specific
types of prospects and nail them with the right pitch. "We look for
subsegments of Internet users who care about certain things," explains
Breen Vogel. "We find them when they're online, we intercept their
activities, and we start a relationship with them."
To understand how the Internet and firms like ClearGauge have been
changing advertising from a slippery craft to what might be called
"persuasion engineering," consider the campaign ClearGauge has been
developing on behalf of Mod-Pac, a Buffalo company that manufactures
cartons and handles printing and packaging for more than 5,000
companies. Mod-Pac came to ClearGauge for help in launching a new
24-hour online service specializing in running fast, less expensive
print jobs for businesses. Instead of conducting endless brainstorming
sessions in search of a clever campaign hook, a team led by Breen Vogel
-- a former industrial engineer with experience in supply-chain
management -- attacked the problem the way a government contractor might
set about building a nuclear submarine.
The team started off by breaking Mod-Pac's target market into seven
submarkets, including event planners, ad agencies, and not-for-profit
organizations. Each of these submarkets was further broken down
according to who influenced the key purchase in each category -- in some
cases a secretary can have as much influence on a buying decision as a
CEO, but the two need very different sorts of pitches. In the past, for
example, ClearGauge has gone after doctors' spouses to sell medical
supplies and lawyers to sell commercial financial services. ClearGauge
then enlisted online surveys and focus groups to uncover the hot buttons
for each type of purchase influencer in each submarket. Some decision
makers valued sophistication in their printing company, while others
placed more emphasis on creativity, and still others on low cost.
Different ads were then cooked up for the different targets, so that,
for example, a creative director at an ad agency was targeted with a
pitch that featured a dancing, mischievous lizard mascot, while a CFO at
a nonprofit got a more sober version of the lizard with glasses and a
pitch that emphasized cost-savings. To make sure each pitch ended up in
front of its intended target, ClearGauge studied the click-through
statistics on hundreds of business-oriented websites for banner-ad
placement and paid search engines to have specific ads come up in
response to some 5,000 carefully chosen terms. By obsessively monitoring
how many people click on each of the ads to end up on Mod-Pac's
website, and then noting what each person does at the website,
ClearGauge can further refine the relevance and placement of each of the
ads while weeding out the less effective efforts.
Online advertisers are about to get a new tool that will vastly
increase their ability to place highly relevant ads in front of
prospects. Emerging now are powerful "behavioral targeting" services
that can track what an individual clicks on and looks at across a range
of sites over the course of weeks and months, making it possible to
build a detailed profile of that person's interests, purchases, and
preferences. The companies prepared to do the tracking, including 24/7 Real Media, Blue Lithium, Dotomi,
and Claria, don't capture personal information such as names or e-mail
addresses -- only surfing habits -- and even then follow only people who
have opted in to the tracking.
But that's enough to let advertisers do a far better job of matching
pitches and prospects. At least 950 out of every 1,000 Internet
automobile ads still land in front of people who aren't in the market
for a car, notes Scott Eagle, chief marketing officer of Claria, based in Redwood City, Calif.
"If you're starting a high-end pet-food company, you only want to talk
to people who have a certain type of pet and are willing to pay a
premium to feed it," he adds. "We can identify those people. Why do you
need to reach anyone else?" In a study, website visitors were, on
average, 14 times more likely to click on an ad when it matched their
profiles, claims Eagle. He says he has already lined up more than 200
advertisers for his new tracking service and expects to reach 500 by the
end of the year.
Given privacy concerns, will many Internet users opt to participate
in these sorts of services? Actually, they might. Because according to a
2004 survey by the Ponemon Institute,
a consultancy that specializes in Internet privacy issues and has
worked with Claria, two-thirds of Internet users believe better targeted
ads would be less annoying, and 45% would share personal information in
exchange for that advertising relevance.
But it's not just the Internet that's poised to become a bastion of
highly targeted advertising. In fact, the trend to interactive, targeted
advertising is starting to break its chains to the computer screen.
Even television, the grande dame of conventional mass marketing, is
taking steps to offer a more focused advertising experience. For
starters, A.C. Nielsen
and other companies have been rolling out technology to measure more
accurately who is watching which shows, providing test viewers with
pagers, for example, that can measure TV-watching habits outside their
homes. Experian, a consumer data company in Costa Mesa,
Calif., is cross-referencing this sort of detailed TV-viewer
information with vast troves of other consumer behavior data so that a
network can pinpoint viewers not just by age or income but also by what
products they're in the market for. "If you give people a television
program that indexes well against their preferences, you'll get more
mental click-through," says William Engel, co-CEO of Experian subsidiary Simmons Market Research Bureau.
Some advertisers are getting even finer-tuned pitches by negotiating
the ability to alter their TV ad slots in response to changing
conditions. Some TV ads for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, for example, have been set to run only when the temperature drops below a certain point in a given market.
And even bigger changes are in the wings as television starts to morph into a more Internet-like experience. Cable provider Comcast offers advertisers in parts of Florida
the chance to buy ads that run only in specific neighborhoods, so that,
for example, ads for a Spanish-language newspaper appear only in
heavily Latino communities. The technology to target cable ads all the
way down to specific homes according to household viewing habits already
exists, with deployment largely awaiting the resolution of privacy
concerns. Cable companies are also experimenting with interactive
channels that let viewers enlist their remote controls to click on
banner ads and onscreen buttons. Video games are getting with the
program too. Some are already packed with ads integrated into the
cyberscenery, and a New York company called Massive has developed a technique for changing those ads to match an individual player's moves and preferences.
As more networked display screens permeate our homes -- on
appliances, walls, even furniture -- each one will become a potential
medium for tuned-to-your-lifestyle ad services of the sort that
Accenture's Fano and others are dreaming up. Think of this new breed of
advertisement as "smart," in that these ads know, in a sense, to whom
they will be playing and under what circumstances.
Smart ads, it turns out, won't be confined
to the home and office. In three Massachusetts Stop & Shop
supermarkets, an electronic tablet attached to the shopping carts asks
for a swipe of the shopper's loyalty card -- and in return provides a
shopping list that the store's computers have prepared based on the
shopper's past purchases. Oh, and by the way, the tablet also offers
targeted electronic coupons that pop up when the shopper turns down the
aisle with the featured product. "Why offer a discount on your yogurt to
someone who usually buys it anyway?" asks Fano, whose lab helped
develop a similar technology. "You want to pitch someone who's about to
buy a rival brand."
Computer screens are popping up everywhere, and more and more
advertisers are thinking up ways to make sure those screens don't go to
waste. Take elevators, which now often sport displays above the floor
buttons. These screens are becoming prime advertising real estate as
marketers grab the chance to catch businesspeople or affluent tourists
on their way to the street. Targeting elevator ads to the location, time
of day, and audience is not rocket science, notes Larry Harris, who heads up multicultural marketing at marketing agency Draft New York. "Bloomingdale's
could boost sales 5% if it put up an ad for a one-day sweater sale in
my building at lunchtime," says Harris. "Everyone in the elevator will
see it because they're desperate to not have to look at anyone else."
Taxis are becoming smart-ad vehicles too. Some New York City
cabs have screens inside, and some taxis in New York and elsewhere have
electronic messaging signs that are tied to GPS location sensors, so
that a cab can pitch a nearby store or restaurant wherever it roams.
Even your own car will get in the game. General Motors has been experimenting with location-aware sponsored messages tied to its OnStar
communications system -- and all the major auto manufacturers are
looking into ways to hook car-based displays up to the Internet, ads and
all.
Not that drivers of nonwired cars, or even pedestrians, will miss out
on the fun of targeted ads. Digital billboards and posters, which
function essentially as large video screens, are already popping up
alongside roads and sidewalks, adjusting their displays to different
audiences -- a commuter crowd during morning rush hour, moms running
errands midmorning, and young couples on dates in the evening. For even
more precision, Smart Sign Media in Sacramento
operates digital highway billboards that detect the radio stations
playing in passing cars and flash up client ads that best match the
profiles of those stations' listeners. And Mobiltrak in Herndon, Va.,
places car-radio-station-identifying sensors in the parking lots of
retail clients so they can tell if people driving into the lots have
been nudged there by their radio ads, allowing them to adjust a radio
campaign to get the most traffic for the least cost.