• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, July 13, 2010

For as long as I have been covering digital media, almost all elements of the online ad supply chain have been wringing their hands over the dearth of good creative. "What was the last online ad you can remember?" was the stock question I always heard asked from professional conference stages. A decade after I first heard this lament, the self-flagellation continues online and now has migrated to mobile. Playing a bit on digital media's own inferiority complex Steve Jobs promised that his new iAd format was going to bring the "emotion" of TV and video to mobile advertising.

Well, as I opined about elsewhere at MediaPost recently, the first run of iAds is pretty underwhelming.

Nevertheless, Jobs' message about invisible, irrelevant and ineffective digital creative appears to be resonating elsewhere. At the recent Allen & Company media mogul "Summit" Google CEO Eric Schmidt seems to have taken up the cause with a promise of what he called "interactive video ads" according to a Wall Street Journal report.

WSJ says these are not pre-roll ads so much as a new kind of display for any sort of Web page. "Such ads, which could appear anywhere on a Web page, not just inside a video, would be more like mini-Web pages. That means they could allow users to watch a video, leave a comment and see real-time updates within the ads that are more customized to their interests."

Well, I am not entirely sure I know what Schmidt is talking about here and whether it represents anything different from the video-powered display we already see on many pages or the highly interactive rich media units we have had for years. The WSJ piece says he has tasked his ad teams to come up within something like this but there are no firm plans as yet.

As the WSJ piece points out, the mogul summit seemed preoccupied with schemes to better monetize digital platforms with ads that were either more visually compelling or more targeted and relevant. Email daily deal publisher Groupon was promoting its plan to get beyond the banner or pre-roll altogether with in-box promotions wrapped in attractive content. Quantcast was pushing the demand-side model of buying audiences across properties rather than site specific media real estate.

As traditional media starts looking to digital platforms for real money that helps keep their lights on and corner offices carpeted, it is striking to see how little online advertising has evolved in a decade. Most Web pages still look like crowded bazaars of poorly designed kiosks. If banners and rich media ads are invisible it is because the human eye knows to defend itself from the visual assault of a Web page, which is so different from an immersive full-page print ad or the screen-filling TV spot. More "impactful" ad formats, more relevance? Okay, fine try it. But until the Web kills the clutter, it barely matters how creative or relevant an ad is if it is choked by so much else.