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IBM Predicts Massive Shifts In Advertising

Posted by kdawson on Sat Nov 10, 2007 05:41 PM
from the adapt-or-die dept.
IBM Businesses
Tech.Luver writes with news from IBM Global Business Services about its new report, The End of Advertising as We Know It (report PDF, summary PDF). It forecasts greater disruption for the advertising industry in the next five years than has occurred over the previous 50. Among the conclusions: broadcasters will have to change their mass audience mind-set to cater to niche consumer segments. Distributors will need to deliver targeted, interactive advertising for a range of multimedia devices. Advertising agencies must become brokers of consumer insights and guide allocation of advertising dollars amid exploding choices. All players must adapt to a world where advertising inventory is increasingly bought and sold in open exchanges vs. traditional channels.
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Submission: IBM Predicts the End of Advertising as We Know It by Tech.Luver (1130091)
[+] Your Rights Online: IBM Files DVD Spam Patent Application 170 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Mark Wilson of Gizmodo.com reports that IBM is applying for a patent for DVDs that contain or download 'on demand' commercials that cannot be skipped. Consumers would be able to purchase these DVDs at a lower price than regular DVDs and pay extra to enjoy their purchase ad-free without having to buy a second DVD. Perhaps this is part of the massive shift in advertising that IBM predicts."
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  • Agreed (Score:2, Interesting)

    by timmarhy (659436)
    With the advent of PVR's and increasingly sofisticated adblocking software as well as do not call lists, there is a growing trend that people are sick to death of all the advertising in their lives.

    the world is fucking saturated in the stuff, and something has to give.

    I know i'm personally sick to death of mobile phone dating scams and panty liner ads being marketed to me on TV.

  • Advertisers will become more devious (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AmiMoJo (196126) <mojo.world3@net> on Saturday November 10 2007, @05:58PM (#21309485) Homepage
    The technology already exists to almost completely avoid adverts. PVRs, downloading, adblock plugins, spam filters etc. I never recognise any of the ads when forced to watch them at a friends house.

    The solution advertisers will come up with is to be more devious. More ads in more annoying places, that are harder to avoid. Mass astroturfing, product placement, adware etc. It's no wonder Microsoft are filing patents for ad delivery at the OS level - they could become the only people capable of delivering ads at all.

    • Re:Advertisers will become more devious (Score:4, Interesting)

      by pokerdad (1124121) on Saturday November 10 2007, @06:48PM (#21309729)

      The technology already exists to almost completely avoid adverts.

      As you point out yourself, its all about being devious, though I wonder from your choice of words if you recognize how much this is already going on. Obviously many of these deals are made away from the public eye, so you can only guess as to their existence, but if you watch closely there are clues; on a couple of my favourite shows I have noticed that anytime a character is using a computer it is a Dell, and since noticing this I have come to realise that a good clean shot of the Dell logo occurs at least once per episode.

      Your point about the MS patent makes me wonder if the difference between home and business versions of the next MS OS will be ads vs no-ads.

    • More ads in more annoying places, that are harder to avoid. Mass astroturfing, product placement, adware etc.

      Actually, product placement isn't that new. It's quite old, dating back to plain old radio itself. Except then, they tended to be a bit more blatant... "This radio show is brought to you buy XXXX soap - cleans better and faster!". They would actually do it during the show itself. When TV came about, the same things occurred - you'd have the actors/actresses/newsanchors/etc suddenly place the product

      • "Google Adsense and beer commercials come to mind as examples of non-annoying ads."

        FTFS (From the F*** Summary: "Distributors will need to deliver targeted, interactive advertising for a range of multimedia devices."

        I do NOT want beer ads (or even text ads) on my cell phone under ANY conditions. SMS spam was bad enough!

        Advertising that lies (and a lot of it lies) is one of the reasons consumers are so dumb nowadays - so-called "fruit drinks made with natural flavors" is a good example of this sort o

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by dnixon112 (663069)
        I guess you owe CowboyNeal a punch in the face for having the audacity to run an advertising driven website.

      • Re:The solution is simple (Score:5, Funny)

        by pyrrhonist (701154) on Saturday November 10 2007, @09:29PM (#21310547)

        Really, the solution is simple and it's in our very hands. If you can put on a pair of gloves,

        I agree with you completely. Also, if you can put on a pair of gloves, why not Isotoner gloves to Ease pain and swelling (tm)?

        or wear a watch without it falling onto the ground as you walk, you have the tools to stop this sort of crap.

        Not to worry! If you buy a Timex, you can rest assured that it takes a licking and keeps on ticking (tm)!

        Put simply, it is this: If you know or meet someone in advertising or marketing, punch them in the face as hard as you can.

        How about a nice Hawaiian Punch? (tm)

        No, this isn't some Bill Hicks-like rant. Just think about how all-pervasive advertising and marketing is - it's everywhere, it's inescapable, and it serves no purpose other than to separate you from your money.

        That's why I always choose to carry the American Express Card. If someone takes it, I have the peace of mind that any unauthorized purchases are completely refundable. Membership has its privileges (tm).

        On top of that, in every waking moment - from the minute you get up and put on your clothes or make your breakfast

        And what makes a breakfast complete? Kellogs Raisin Bran, of course! There's two scoops in every box (tm). Delicious!

        to the second you turn out the light at night - in a million different little ways, it impinges on your mental environment.

        I hate it when too much light impinges on me when it's time to go to bed. That's why I use The Clapper to turn out the lights. Clap On, Clap Off, The Clapper (tm)!

        In itself 99% of it is of no benefit to you, it's existence is detrimental to society as a whole, and there's a whole industry devoted to finding ways of force-feeding you more of it. In modern society, about the only thing you encounter more often than advertising is air molecules.

        And what better way to cool those air molecules than with an award winning air conditioner from Trane? It's hard to stop a Trane (tm).

        The only way they'll stop hurting you is if you hurt them first. Remember that next time you find yourself idly whistling a jingle...

        Need to stop hurting fast? Extra Strength Excedrin's combination of acetaminophen, aspirin, and caffeine starts working in just 15 minutes! The pain stops. You don't (tm).

        You've been reading Slashdot.
        Slashdot is supported by grants from these corporations and from viewers like you.

  • press release (Score:4, Informative)

    by statemachine (840641) on Saturday November 10 2007, @06:00PM (#21309495)
    And submitted by tech.luver, who is racing with ponca down the the bottom of the pit where roland lives.

    All these people want to do is promote their blogs. If /. would not directly link these people's names to any other website than /. these people will go away.
    • I hear of lot of this complaining, and yet nobody starts their own site instead. If you REALLY think this is the way to go, go start your own site and feel free to link it back here with 'stories' that link to your blog. Everyone else does.

  • And IBM finally noticed the obvious. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by loftwyr (36717) on Saturday November 10 2007, @06:01PM (#21309501)
    This is not new. The upheaval in the advertising industry has been causing a change for the past five years. Even the largest ad agencies have made broad changes to their operating structure and moved to a much more dynamic and multi-media format.

    Media giants (NBC, CBS, ABC, BBC, CBC, ITV, etc., etc.) have embraced this change months and/or years ago and are moving their sales to much more targetted audiences, with the exception of prime time mega-shows.

    Media buying agencies have stopped looking only at Nielsen data and circulation data (reach and frequency figures) and are using far more types of information to make their choices. The 10,000 digital cable channels and the explosive growth of on-line advertising forced that a long time ago.

    All of these groups (perhaps except IBM, who just woke up) have been looking at how people watch and segmenting them by attitude, life stage and much more than age and income. Especially when the advertisers are using a combination of TV, Radio, Internet and maybe even print (there still is printed stuff out there, right? It's not all just bits, now?). The amount of information used to make decisions is growing.

    I, for one, welcome our Google media overlords.
    • Exactly. Computer and internet companies are like 14-year-old girls. They like to pretend that only they can invent new things and anything older than them is obsolete.

      Media companies change. Even the giants. It's the part that IBM, Google, et.al. don't see or won't admit. Both Google and IBM use newspapers to advertise. What does that tell you?

      150 years ago newspaper was going to drive the spoken word out of business. It didn't.
      70 years ago radio was going to drive newspapers out of business. It did

      • When it comes to computers, anything older than IBM is obsolete.

        Somehow I don't think the company that decided to invest a billion dollars in GPL'd Linux is suffering an excess of NIH.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Ox0065 (1085977)
      Google are among a very few groups who consistently manage to place well targeted adds in front of me.
      Sometimes the degree to which they are successfully targeted gets a little scary...

      One of the others is IBM. They really are very good at it. They suddenly made a MASSIVE improvement from my perspective about six months after Steve Jobs declared PowerPC dead. IBM went from silent antiquated zero to cutting edge reliable voice of reason. Would anyone care to compare dates?

      I think what this is saying is more
  • IBM is "forecasting" what has already happened and what everyone in the industry already knows. Their study is simply an assessment of the present moment. They are "predicting" -- or rather, strongly encouraging by way of statistical evidence -- that the big corporate laggards in their customer base will/should get with the program, preferably IBM's, as soon as possible.

      • IBM predicted that world demand would be satisfied with five computers. They also thought there would be no harm in outsourcing operating systems. No profit there after all. Right?

        If IBM told me the sun was going to rise tomorrow, I'd get a tarot reading just to be sure.

        Two points. First it is Thomas J. Watson who it is claimed said that the world would never need more than five computers. The best evidence is that he never said it. It appears that this is a mis attribution of a misquote of a different computer experthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson [wikipedia.org]. Second, the reason that IBM outsourced the operating system for the first PC is because they were in the middle of a protracted and difficult antitrust lawsuit by the Justice Department. If they had developed the

  • The only interaction I want with advertising... (Score:3, Informative)

    by analog_line (465182) on Saturday November 10 2007, @06:13PM (#21309567)
    ...is stopping it dead in its tracks. And as far as targetted ads go, I prefer targetting ads before they can target me.
      • But the ads aren't free. For every dollar an ad costs it redirects more than one dollar of your spendings to another product, or it wouldn't be worth spending the money on the ad in the first place. (This is statistically speaking over the whole population of course)

        And where does the money that the advertisers pay the cable company come from. It is added to the cost of the products you buy of course.

      • "Say right now cable companies get $200 per person per month, with the amount you pay plus the amount they receive for ads."

        Cable companies don't get the ad revenue for ads, except for shows they own, and they would get that anyway.

        Digital recorders are now under $100.00, so you can just record your shows to a dvd-rw and skip over all the ads. Separate "ads" are "sooo lasssst cennnntuuury!"

        • Cable companies don't get the ad revenue for ads, except for shows they own, and they would get that anyway.

          Depends on your cable company. On most cable TV shows on popular channels, the last couple of ads of the break are inserted by the cable company which gets the money. The technology for doing so has become so cheap over the years that even small cable companies can do it. Most people don't notice until they change to satellite or move to a place with a different cable company.

  • How much would you pay for TV? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by yotto (590067) on Saturday November 10 2007, @06:15PM (#21309585) Homepage
    When Coke realizes that nobody's watching their commercials, it may get expensive to watch Heroes.

    I don't know how much advertising (that I don't watch, thanks to my DVR) subsidizes my TV watching, but I do know that I wouldn't pay that much more than I currently pay for TV. Does that mean the end of TV? I like a small number of shows. If they're too expensive for me to pay for (or worse, too expensive for enough people, but not me, so the shows go bankrupt even though I'd happily pay) will I lament the good old days when the corporations helped fund them?

    Is that worse than it is now?

    I don't know. But this post is brought to you by Gatorade, with the electrolytes that plants love.
    • Things will shift, but there is too much potential money in mass entertainment for it to disappear. Even if the monetary return per eyeball watching drops, anything that can convince several million people to tune in, or whatever the future equivalent, will be worth cash to someone.

      My guess? Direct downloads supported by 'channels' that serve up the first few episodes of random series to get people interested. Different series will aim at very niche markets. You really don't need a very large percentage

      • >"My guess? Direct downloads supported by 'channels' that serve up the first few episodes of random series to get people interested. Different series will aim at very niche markets. You really don't need a very large percentage of the population to support a TV series. Roughly 200,000 people (which is nothing when your potential audience is everyone worldwide) paying up $2-$3 (aka pocket change) per episode and you have a reliable budget of a half million per. You can make some damn fine television for

        • Well, as of January, Apple claims to have sold over 50 million episodes of various series through iTunes. The framework is there, and so is the proof of concept. Give it a couple years.

          Besides, as far as I can tell, the demo model for games seems to work. At the very least, someone thinks it does. Many new games release a demo before launch. WoW has frequent 14 day trial periods. One of the most popular features on XBox live are demo downloads. So, the people with the money seem to think it works.
      • Interesting idea, except it cuts out the 70-80% of the people without an Internet connection fast enough to watch video. Download it? It would only take a whole evening to do so with a slow DSL or dial-up connection. Unless you think the show is watchable at 176x120.

        Yeah, someday television might be replaced by the Internet. Not anytime soon, though with your average TV running $100 or less and your cheapest computer at $500 or so. And the really low-end computers aren't going to be great for video.
        • By the time the technology is in place to seriously compromise the add revenues of traditional broadcast, the same technology will be in place to (potentially) replace it. For every house with a TiVo or Media Centre in place to skip commercials there is one more house to sell direct downloads to. Right now? No. Soon? Sooner than many expect.

    • I don't know how much advertising (that I don't watch, thanks to my DVR) subsidizes my TV watching, but I do know that I wouldn't pay that much more than I currently pay for TV.

      Most TV shows are available on DVD. These generally come with no commercials. I've been watching Heroes on HD-DVD.

      Maybe they wouldn't exist if not for the advertising, but I somehow doubt that. After all, where do summer blockbuster movies get their money? Generally not advertising, at least, not much.

    • When Coke realizes that nobody's watching their commercials, it may get expensive to watch Heroes.
      The heroes will simply start drinking more coke, talk standing in front of more coke machines and coke billboards, buy more new cars, shop in particular stores because of their low prices and good quality, etc.

  • As users get more choice, advrters must get bolder (Score:3, Informative)

    by backslashdot (95548) on Saturday November 10 2007, @06:38PM (#21309675)
    As users get more choice, advertisers must get bolder. Why? Because people are unaware of products and services.

    So expect advertisers to pull more and more stunts (for the sake of the economy and with the blessing of govt. of course).

    For example the forced sitting through a boring 20 second ad that doesnt even mention the product until the very end. Full screen web ads should get to the point within 1 or 2 seconds MAX.

    If people only par for and download online the tv shows they like .. people would no longer watch ads on TV. So the only thing advertisers can do is put intrusive advertising on webpages .. but eventually users will reject and move on from that.

    And so they will resort to buy mailing lists and sending spam.

    That's why I am going to have to resort to using a different email for every thing I sign up for.

    I mean the service provided by mailinator is good .. but it's easier just having a domain name and being able to block emails getting sent to a particular adress.

    So for example lets say slashdot was my domain .. if I sign on using backslashdot@slashdot.org for a company's mailing list .. and I find out they have been selling that email address I can just block that particular email address. All other @slashdot emails sent to me would work.

    Note, I am not against advertising .. I click on web ads if they inform me of inventive stuff I could really use.
    • I could point to lots of examples -- the most recent is likely the Mac/PC ads, which I went out of my way to watch. Another would have to be the Chuck Norris / Mountain Dew ads.

      Most ads are utterly forgettable, except for the conditioning they do -- or they're just really annoying, like "punch the monkey". Some ads, particularly Google text ads, can be helpful without being in the way.

      But the best ads are the ones that are entertaining enough that you actively seek them out. (That, and complete grassroots -

    • Note, I am not against advertising .. I click on web ads if they inform me of inventive stuff I could really use.

      I do the same thing, but it's all problematic, isn't it?

      Advertising wouldn't be so annoying if it didn't show me ads I don't care about. If I could watch the Discovery Channel without ads for car insurance (don't have a car), mortgage refinancing (don't have a mortgage), or intimate feminine products (don't have girly bits) I would be happier.

      If the shows had ads for things I actually car

  • Some insight for the advertisers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Iphtashu Fitz (263795) on Saturday November 10 2007, @06:39PM (#21309681)
    Personally, I HATE any website that has animated advertising of any type. When I'm trying to read an article, whether its somebodies personal blog or a major news corporation, I find animation of any type highly distracting. The animation always distracts my eyes from reading the article that I'm actually interested in. Rather than put up with distracting advertisements I make use of various tools to block Flash, animated gifs, etc. If those don't work for a particular website then I simply stop visiting those sites. For example, I used to visit the ABC news website (abcnews.com) on a regular basis but ever since their last couple of "upgrades" to their website I've avoided them like the plague. I find their use animation on their front page extremely annoying. Back when they had a more static home page I would visit their site on a daily basis, but they've effectively driven me away from all the "glitz" they've added. I now go elsewhere for the news and won't got back to ABC news any time soon. They need to realize that animated makeovers that do nothing more than demonstrate that their designers know all about "Web 2.0", CSS, etc. has a huge potential for turning away potential visitors.
    • In the bad old days of programming, we called the gratuitous use of color the "Christmas Tree Effect".

      Subtlety is the key to elegance, and in that regard most commercial sites have a loooong way to go.
    • Great ad placement, ABC shill ;)

    • Personally, I HATE any website that has animated advertising of any type. When I'm trying to read an article, whether its somebodies personal blog or a major news corporation, I find animation of any type highly distracting. The animation always distracts my eyes from reading the article that I'm actually interested in.

      You can fix that with a pill now, you know [wikipedia.org].

    • There's nothing worse than going to a web site, and all of a sudden, some jingle pops out.
    • I visit Google news often because I find that it's a good place to find a lot of news aggregated into one place. However, I find that a lot of the stories they link to are on terrible site, with tons of popups, and tooltips on every single word. I often wonder if google has any plans to try to get rid of links to sites with this crap. Google news would really be an amazing service, if it wasn't for the fact that most of the sites it links to are complete tripe.
    • If you happen to use Firefox, a little trick I learned the other day (but which has probably been there for ages) is to tap the escape key once the page has loaded. It stops animated GIF's dead in their tracks.

      - Fellow animated ad hater
    • The distracting function of something that moves is exactly what the advertisers want to exploit.
      Personally, I've disabled animated gif's and installed Adblock [mozdev.org] and NoScript [mozilla.org].
      This helps me avoid almost all web-advertisement and has the added benefit of getting me rid of annoying flash-intros/interfaces and such crap.
  • "Distributors will need to deliver targeted, interactive advertising for a range of multimedia devices."

    Dancing aliens for everyone!

  • Sounds more like Google after-effect...

  • I can believe that this might happen, but remember that most of what the Internet is today is supported by broadcast advertising. Television is supported by broadcast advertising, on both OTA broadcast and cable channels.

    If the bottom were to drop out of broadcast advertising on the Internet, on television, in print publications, we would see a massive contraction in the economy and in all things familiar since the latter half of the 20th century. Most of this growth has been financed and nutured by adver
  • I own an independent True Value hardware store and for the past three years we've been building a customer loyalty program [wikipedia.org] (True Value Rewards, developed by True Value and Insight Out of Chaos [iooc.com]). This allows us to avoid the expense and waste of mass media (newspapers, radio, and direct mail flyers) and instead directly mail targeted pieces to our top customers. Some of the big retailers have started to adopt loyalty programs (Tesco is a prime example [loyalty.vg]) and it will be interesting to see if Target, Home Depot

  • How about the end of advertising? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jollyreaper (513215) on Sunday November 11 2007, @12:31AM (#21311285)
    A boy can dream, can't he? Yeah, all ads ain't going away but we're a lot closer to doing away with many of them than we were before. I hate commercial radio due to the static playlists and advertising. Online radio lets me get varied content for free with minimal ads; if I pay, I can skip all ads. That's wonderful. Time was when you had to take the ads with the show if you wanted to watch it. The VCR let you skip the ads and now the DVD lets you buy the show directly and is making the possibility of direct-to-DVD distribution of quality first-run shows a real possibility.

    Mass media as we know it is so last century -- it had to be big, bulky, and lowest common denominator because that's where the economies of scale lay. "Narrowcasting" was a buzzword that came about during speculation concerning internet video back during the original bubble but it's a buzzword that still means something. If your overhead is low enough, you can turn a reasonable profit catering to a niche, and probably with better margins than trying to broadcast to a larger audience, incurring greater overhead in the process. All of this ad shit we see is just a byproducy of the bygone age. The very first broadcasters realized that they needed something to pay the freight. Advertising became the be-all and end-all of public broadcasting and shows were little more than something to keep you tuned in between commercials. Some really fine art managed to be made in the process but the guys in the suits didn't give a shit, the ads were what captured their fancy.

    Well, we can finally say "fuck the networks. Fuck the advertising-supported distribution medium." We've got the internet now and we have proven business models that allow for electronic distribution for a profit. People can directly support the shows they want to watch/listen to and there's no Neilsen ratings crap to deal with. It's clean, honest, and will put a lot of ad-men out of work. I couldn't be happier.
  • Advertising works because you pay attention to something you already know and it continue make you remembering the brand, or it show you something new and you memorize it. But if you are literally drowned in an advertising world, there is so much you can memorize, and either you will memorize only a few good one, or you will memorize negatively the worst one (some of the worst 80th ad showing women in general as dumbwitt blondy made me swear I will never buy from their brand, and yes it was a brand directed
    • I'd rather watch no ads, and ask the web site to compete for my money with their materials. But as it stands now, with NoScript and AdBlock Plus I see no ads whatsoever, and pages load very fast. I'd sooner avoid a site than watch an ad.
    • Without advertising though, the cost of everything we buy would be less. So, instead of a mass of TV you don't like but pay for anyway buy buying anything but fresh produce at a local farmer's market, you'd only pay for the TV you like. This would save people who have taste money. Those who don't care what they watch, they'll pay more.
      • I'd even settle for paying for channels I like.
        At the moment I only have what is included for "free" in my rent. That is 10 channels, of which I watch 2, so I pay for 8 useless channels in my rent.
        If I want more channels, I have to subscribe to a packages of channels. The three channels I want are in three different packs, so I would have to pay for about 30 channels to get them!
        I'd gladly pay a little more per channel if I could get the 5 channels I want without also getting the other 35 crap channels.

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