New Media Age, 4 December 2003

NMA asked the UK’s leading online marketing players, including DMC’s MD, what we can expect in the online arena over the coming year.

Both online and offline, 2004 looks set to be a tipping point in the way advertising is approached and carried out.

Some of the ad industry’s leading lights are admitting that much advertising no longer works. There’s just too much and people are learning to ignore it. On top of that, communications channels abound, so the audience has become fragmented and harder to target.

The whole model of interruptive advertising is being called into question, and advertisers and agencies are looking at new ways to re-engage audiences. BBH’s John Hegarty has even gone as far as saying that his agency is now in the business of entertainment, not marketing.

This kind of marketing communication is being called ‘advertainment’. What’s interesting is that advertainment’s most accessible communications channel is the Web, because it can engage people proactively, enabling them to interact with a brand, not just sit passively watching. It can also enable and inspire easy peer-to-peer communication resulting in that holy grail of user endorsement of the advertiser’s message.

Ironically, although the Web is the perfect channel for advertainment, bodies like the IAB are pushing for more creative use of interruptive, banner-type advertising, including rich media pop-ups. Yet these ad formats are rapidly being seen by many as simply adding to the growing clutter online. Research shows overwhelmingly that audiences dislike them as much as any other interruptive form of communication.

The growth of advertainment is a threat to online agencies that peddle the same perceived wisdom of ‘bannerdom’. Until now, most above-the-line agencies have ignored the online world, or at best got it very wrong. But they are now starting to see it as another channel through which they can engage audiences, as well as reach the unreachable, using advertainment-style content. This could have a significant impact on online agency revenue as their above-the-line counterparts starting chipping away at their budgets.