• by Tom Hespos , October 8, 2002

Over the years, the Interactive advertising industry has had to make several concessions to clients and agency folk in order to make the medium more palatable to traditional taste buds. At times, I’ve felt as if these concessions were selling the medium short.

The first time I can recall feeling this way was in 1996, when ad standards were a hot issue. Prior to the release of the IAB’s standard sizes, the web represented a blank canvas. A media plan that covered 10 sites would often necessitate the production of several dozen different ad sizes. Back in those days, I resisted size standardization to some degree, as I thought that any standardization would tend to stifle creativity. After all, if advertisers had virtually limitless options open to them with respect to how they advertised on websites, why would they ever agree to limit their creative palette? I was pretty passionately against ad standards. But I was young, relatively inexperienced, and just plain wrong.

As it turned out, ad size standardization allowed clients to take one of two paths. Clients that needed to launch an online campaign quickly could take advantage of the ad standards and would only need to produce a handful of sizes. Clients that wanted to spend additional time and funds creating custom ads for each website could also go that route. Creativity wasn’t stifled, campaigns became a lot more efficient and everyone was reasonably happy.

Around a year later, the industry started to make some noise about demographics and demo targeting. At the time, many of the publisher-side ad serving solutions were striking partnerships with offline database companies to reverse-append all sorts of data, including basic demographics, to online cookies. Such partnerships could have given advertisers access to demographic targeting. Again, I resisted. Why would websites sell themselves short by targeting demographically when there were several other targeting options open to advertisers that would be more effective? I saw demographic targeting as a concession that would limit the capabilities of the web in the name of integration with other types of media that couldn’t target as well. My boss at the time, Joe Apprendi, made a prediction. “Make no mistake,” he said. “Demographics are going to be big on the web.”

As we all know, ad server data appending bit the big one. However, demo targeting has experienced a resurgence as of late, with sites gathering declared data through registration information and sweepstakes entries that will allow them to target this way. And the debate is back. One industry professional who sees demo targeting as being extremely limited is Scott Eagle, chief marketing officer at the Gator Corporation. In a recent phone conversation, Eagle conveyed these words of wisdom:

“If you’re looking for in-market car buyers, why should you narrow your reach to upscale Men 25-54 when behavioral marketing can provide actual in-market car buyers?” he asked.

I agree with Scott, but I also think that demo targeting will go in the same direction as ad size standardization. Those that need it will get it, but that won’t preclude targeting in other ways for folks who wish to take a different path.

It looks as if the next big concession will be over lead times for campaigns. For years, I’ve been pushing back on abbreviated lead times for interactive campaigns. As an industry, we’ve wrongly set the expectation that online media plans can be turned around in 24 hours and that we can go live within a couple days after a plan is approved. At various industry functions, I’ve heard marketers complain that they can get a TV or radio buy turned around in a couple days and that it takes too long to implement interactive plans.

I think there’s an important difference between this concession and the others. Here, I think we’re setting an expectation for the entire industry, whereas in the other cases, we were conceding only partially.

It takes time to craft compelling and contextually relevant messages. It takes time to decide where to place them. It takes time to evaluate the huge number of options that advertisers have open to them.

My first advertising job was with an account that took plenty of time to put together its yearly plans. We spent the better part of four months crafting a communications plan and an appropriate media plan before seeking client approval to move forward. That represents plenty of time to make sure all objectives, strategies and tactics are absolutely bulletproof. Suggesting that interactive should abbreviate this timeframe to only a few days would represent a concession I’m not very comfortable making.

Standardization and integration with the processes common to other media can make interactive more palatable to traditional tastes. But if you couple these concessions with the ones we are striving to make in the area of turnaround times, I think we’re running the risk of having some traditional advertisers fail to see what makes interactive unique. These concessions are fine for passive, linear media. But do they work for a medium that promotes brand interaction?

To sum up, I think we need to watch ourselves carefully over the next year. There are tradeoffs that we can make in order to help interactive media earn its place alongside print, radio and television, but we need to think about it before we concede the things that make interactive media special.