• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, August 5, 2015

One of the odd, and usually not fun, parts of the journalism job is that you end up talking to people who are excited about an idea that, in your heart of hearts, you know is doomed. Sometimes, you ask questions that you hope will lead them to realize why they shouldn’t be doing the business. Sometimes, you just think it.

But almost always these days, I’m talking to someone who is pitching, good or bad. So it was unusual to hear from Bill Carmody, the CEO of TrepoinT, and a marketing pro who is the author of a book on online promotions and at work on another, who was just venting.

He’s seen a lot of trends and one he wanted to talk about was YouTube’s new 360-degree TrueView ads, by which the user can, by using arrows see the whole ad develop in one bigger vista. (Another company, StartApp, is now offering its own 360 degree ads.) They’re new.

Let’s watch one. There, in that Coke ad, you can see dancers to the left and right and ahead (and if you turn the pointer, you can see the ceiling of what looks like the corridor of a movie studio.) Cool!

Really, not cool.

“I played with these ads,” Carmody told me. “Is this the killer app or is this just an also ran? I could be wrong... ”

But I won’t keep you in suspense. He’s not impressed. The selling point for 360-degree ads is that, man, will you get dragged into these spots! Before you know it, you’ve been watching a minute or maybe more. That’s engagement. Or: that’s twirling around an ad trying to find the point of why you’re twirling around the ad. Carmody says, maybe he’s wrong as could be but he thinks 360s are ads you’ll watch once, and never again.

“If your measurement is impression and clicks, well, OK,” Carmody says.. “But does it move a product? Does it make a sale?”

It would have been a more interesting conversation if I disagreed in the least, but I didn’t.

“Think about it,” he said.”This 360-degree technology has probably existed widely since the 1990s, when you could go to Epcot Center and it did the wonders of the Great Wall of China. There is a time and a place for that kind of video. And that time and place is Epcot Center.”  

YouTube gushed about the ads a couple weeks ago on its Inside AdWords blog:

“Video is already the most effective medium for connecting with consumers thanks to the power of sight, sound and motion. But what if there were a way to let people become even more immersed in your video ads? To help advertisers deliver richer experiences, we’re introducing 360 degree video ads on YouTube...360 degree video ads let you engage your audience in an entirely new way. 

“Available today in Chrome and the YouTube app on Android and iOS, viewers can explore every angle of your videos by dragging their mouse or moving their phone to shift their POV 360 degrees – up, down, left or right. Thanks to the ability simply to move your phone to see different parts of the video, 360 video ads are a truly mobile-first video ad product.”

It’s true. I could hang around to watch the ad, for the sake of watching it, But what’s the point? I’m not even talking about “selling,” because I don’t care that much about being sold. But the experience has to be something. 

And that something has to be more than a bunch of party-goers arriving at Catalina Island for a Bud Light event, which is one of the promoted ads. If you keep watching that YouTube patch, you’ll see another 360, and then a regular old ad for the new Bud Light Lime (in a brand new bottle!). Which is at least as good.

Carmody guesses that advertisers will “struggle’ with an ad platform that is user-directed -- especially true if that direction leads you to nothing much. YouTube says says these ads encouragement engagement. In Carmody’s view, it’s just as likely that a viewer will say, “Not only am I being advertised to, but now you’re asking me to work for it.”