IBM Predicts Massive Shifts In Advertising

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.

Agreed

[timmarhy]

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

[AmiMoJo]

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.

How much would you pay for TV?

[yotto]

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.

Some insight for the advertisers

[Iphtashu Fitz]

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.

Re:Advertisers will become more devious

[pokerdad]

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.

Re:And IBM finally noticed the obvious.

[Ox0065]

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 like:
"This has really been working for us. If you aren't selling us advertising like this, you can stop wasting everyone's time"

and now you know.

How about the end of advertising?

[jollyreaper]

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.