Earlier this week I attended another of the Chinwag Live events in Soho. The topic this week was "Tomorrow's Ad Formats" and the panel of guests chosen to kick off the debate and impart their expert opinion was comprised of five people:
Priya Prakash - Creative Director, Hachette Filipacchi
Rhys Williams - Co-founder, agenda21
Steven Hess - Managing Partner, weapon7
David Burrows - Ad Operations Director, Phorm UK
Mat Morrison - Digital Planning Director, Porter Novelli
and the whole event was chaired by Guy Phillipson - CEO, Internet Advertising Bureau.
In this first post I'll try to summarise each of the panel member's introductions and the key points they set out when making their opening statements...
Priya
Priya is a proponent of user centered design and believes that it will play a key role in the future of marketing. Agencies are limited by their briefs to some degree, in what they receive as instruction from the client, and the client's own vision of what they think the future of marketing is going to be. Agencies need to be able to separate themselves from this to help stretch the true boundaries of future marketing.
Quoting The Cluetrain Manifesto as a key influencer (there's a lot of that in this Chinwag - maybe everyone rediscovered their copy of it sitting on a dusty shelf somewhere) she stated that in her opinion marketing has to start adding serious value to the customer and their experience in order to be valid, otherwise ads will serve as nothing but an interruption (a Disruption?) to what users are doing and they will ignore it. In this way she thinks brands themselves are too narcissistic, thinking only of their own needs and ignoring the needs of the customer, and this is what really needs to change in order for them to stop getting in the way and increase relevancy.
Rhys
Rhys sees there being three things in the industry right now which are driving us towards more and more complex media spaces and format choices.
Stating in his first sentence that the problem with digital advertising right now is that everything is driven by jargon, Rhys thinks the media landscape is becoming more and more complicated all the time driven primarily by clients (advertisers), media owners, and lastly by the users themselves.
For a start, some clients, and often some agencies, always want to try and get some advertising Kudos by having a "media first", to appear to be the cutting edge and are always asking during a lot of briefings "what's the next big thing?" This mentality, of associating new formats with cutting edge creative, is part of the problem with why the media landscape is getting so diverse and complex. But it shouldn't be. He questioned why new format opportunities are so important to some clients, why do they see everything in that way as a first being so important?
Rhys then gave an example in Facebook at this very moment which goes for a media first but results in a run of the mill campaign - referring to the rash of experian search ads which have started to appear inside everyone's profile pages whenever they log on (yeah! Why are they SO annoying?) He believes that advertisers who do this are actually being lazy, going for the cheap clicks through a misguided sense that being first will lend their (annoying, interrupting and unimaginative - my words) campaign some extra legs.
Secondly, another problem he sees is that media owners try to push new formats on their space in hope of getting increased CPM, as is the case right now for video formats which can often top £25 CPM as opposed to around £1-ish CPM for a banner placement. Clients then see these formats as an answer to the problem of getting stand out in a crowded environment (certainly though there is some evidence to suggest this works I guess seeing as the CTR on video formats is way higher than on static formats?)
FInally, Rhys said that he thinks often creative agencies want to push the boundaries themselves in terms of formats available to get a creative edge, often resulting in nothing more than a larger amount of real estate with which to play, and that media planners often get pressured by creatives to create plans full of new, larger, more invasive formats.
Steven
Steven said he finds new formats very confusing. He thinks that often lots of things emerge into the spaces available which are simply nothing but technical innovations which are built for no other reason than because they can be - and certainly bear nothing in relation to them being useful for campaigns of customers. He strongly believes that formats don't fuel the creative brief, and never will.
He raised the question that in this climate, how do we, the people working inside the digital industry right now, express creative ideas for a client that users and customers will be able to understand?
Technology in his opinion should be used as an enabler to meet a client's problems, and not as a stick to beat problems with until they fit into a technical shaped box. In the past ten years or so, the digital industry has had a sense of entrepreneurism that's helped us all drive towards more innovative and creative solutions with what tools we had available to us at the time. He fears that this mindset will disappear if we continue down this current path. We must resist the urge to continually give names to all new shapes, formats, ideas and inventions that we all come up with in an attempt to commoditise them and sell them on to others for more and more profit.
He thinks we need to demonstrate solid returns for clients for all of the ideas we give to a client, regardless of the format or what it is, rather than continually trying to turn new spaces we discover into extra formats.
David
Dave thinks that customers right now are fed up being bombarded by endless streams of junk and irrelevant advertising, and that the problem with advertising on the internet is that the signal-to-noise ratio is far too high. For every good ad there are a hundred bad ones for IM smileys or a free iPod. (Oh come on Dave! If it weren't for those ads we would never have been blessed with "Smack The Monkey" banners).
Phorm, for who Dave now works having left Yahoo! for them recently, aim to help users strip down the junk and address the signal-to-noise problem. Because 50% of ads don't work, but no one right now knows which 50% of the ads it is, phorm think they can start to target in a much more effective way than has been previously achieved.
Dave also believes that in the past there has been "an arms race" in terms of banner real estate sizes, for which he holds his hands up to some degree during his time at Yahoo!, and that all media owners, by behaving in this way, have been causing a lot of the problems.
He thinks that Phorm again have the key to this, and through their OIX targetting platform, they can help customers receive the ads which are most relevant to them, in turn helping the agencies and clients as well.
All this with a very anonymous system in which privacy is apparently a key issue which Phorm have taken very seriously.
NOTE: At this point Dave was heckled by a member of the audience who shouted out "You're an advert!" (or something similar, it was hard to hear) basically making the point that Dave was here to talk about Tomorrow's Ad Formats and not just plug Phorm as the cure for cancer.
Mat
Mat claims he really doesn't have much to say about Tomorrow's Ad Formats as he has only worked in PR for about 6 months (perhaps he meant in relation to PR? Because surely if he is ex-AKQA he would have something to say? To be honest I didn't quite understand what he meant here).
What he does think though is that the current climate feels a bit like the late 90's and that worries him. He went on to quote from a press release circa 1997 from the IAB claiming that the 468x60 banner was the future of advertising and better than TV ads.
He wanted us to consider this ten years down the road and be careful of what claims we all make incase they come back to bite us in another ten years.
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That's it for now. Tomorrow (well, hopefully but it is a bank holiday!) I'll post details from the discussion part of the evening where the panel went on to discuss some format specifics in more detail.
Howard
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Discussion time, and the first topic raised by the Chair is the subject of video formats...
Tomorrow (Wednesday) and Thursday I'll be attending the 
