New wave in digital advertising

It’s been a little over 20 years, since the first digital ad appeared. It was an enthusiastic and idealistic time when the early practitioners hoped it was possible to create advertising that is as useful as a service: a content experience that delivers true utility. For the record, the first banner (created in this spirit for AT&T) delivered a 44% click-through rate.

 The journey started slow, but evidence started to gather, and finally, the industry ran its seminal Cross Media Optimization Study a decade later. Known as XMOS, the study helped marketers and their agencies answer the question about the optimal mix of advertising vehicles across different media pegging the recommended proportion of online spending around 10%. As a result, online advertising took off.

 According to Forrester, in 2016 U.S. advertisers' spending on digital advertising will overtake TV, in 2019 it will hit $103 billion to represent 36% of all ad spending.

 But over time the situation became more nuanced, and new developments resulted in a more complex picture raising questions about the direction of digital advertising.

The end of effectiveness

The initial lofty idea of advertising as useful as a service gave way to good-old hard sell,  and performance advertising was born. Its inherent measurability through clicks was refreshing … until it became clear that clicks don’t correlate with any important metric. All this led to banner blindness and ad blockers and even contributed to fraud and viewability issues.

The end of control

The same year the IAB published its XMOS study, a freshman at Harvard launched Thefacebook.com, starting probably the biggest shift to date in how content is created, distributed and consumed. This challenged the most basic fundamentals of the traditional media world: advertisers, who pay for advertising to be created and placed, can control messaging in the marketplace.

 The end of the sales funnel

In response to these tectonic shifts, new alternatives to traditional digital marketing are starting to emerge: approaches that recognize how users prefer to consume content and make decisions.

 The new wave

In response to these tectonic shifts, new alternatives to traditional digital marketing are starting to emerge: approaches that recognize how users prefer to consume content and make decisions.

What are some common characteristics of these approaches?

1. Offer intrinsic benefit

Allow marketers to tell stories and deliver authentic and informative visual content. As a result the user will feel time spent was worth it even if they are not.

1. Embrace and leverage the consumer in control

Demonstrate a uniform approach towards all impressions regardless if they are paid, earned, shared or owned. In other words, create a single instance of content, and publish across all platforms anywhere the target audience spends time. 

1. Real-time feedback & course correction programming 
Monitor all interactions in real-time, and instantly program new content across all digital channels in response to audience interactions moving consumers down the path towards purchase – regardless where they are in their customer journey.

Brace for the next era of digital marketing where online consumers and B2B audiences seek authentic & engaging messages to make buying decisions. They control the engagement process ignoring intrusive and context-blind traditional ads in favor of content as useful as a service. Look out for tools that allow consumers to self-select content that engages them at their time of interest uniformly across platforms. 

A good illustration is of this emerging responsive marketing platform is NextWorks's Content Capsule. It enables marketers to deploy a wide array of solutions addressing specific marketing challenges. They can be created in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of microsites and similar digital content containers.  And they can be distributed across all digital channels serving performance or brand advertising, corporate and public relations, B2B programs, publishing, contests, promotion, surveys and many other objectives. After deployment, the Content Capsule platform’s dashboard will allow for detailed tracking of user engagement and all deployed instances can be updated simultaneously.

These self-contained and autonomous Content Capsules can be embedded into web pages, mobile apps, social platforms, blogs, surveys, etc.  In fact there is a Content Capsules embedded right within the top of this article. They can contain videos, images, data-capture experiences, slides or PDFs.  All this is easily shareable by every user on any platform, as well as accurately tracked and visualized on the backend.