• by Jim Meskauskas , February 3, 2005

Last week I was going through the barrage of e-mail newsletters I receive every day when I came across MediaPost's "Real Media Riffs." This particular piece was, ostensibly, about J. Walter Thompson changing the name of the agency, officially, to "JWT." While the reasons for the change are interesting and sublime to the people who made it, a comment made in the context of the announced name change was of more worth.

CEO Bob Jeffrey also announced a Copernican shift in the agency's core advertising philosophy. "Time is the new currency," he said. "Our job is to ensure that more people spend more time with our clients' brands. We need to create ideas that people want to spend more time with. The better the idea the more time people will spend with it."

Funny, that; time is the new currency. For media companies as a whole, time has always been the currency when you get right down to it. Certainly, certain kinds of people spending time - even just a little - with your media product could translate into premiums not yielded with other audiences, but essentially, a media product wants people to spend more time with it.

A broadcast or cable network wants you spending more time with it over another and attempts to accomplish this with programming that you find more interesting, entertaining, and engaging. A publisher wants you spending more time with their magazine in your lap than another magazine. The more time you have a particular radio channel tuned in while you are stuck on the 405, the better it is for that station.

It makes sense that advertising would look to this notion as a core principle for brand promotion. The recent history of advertising is filled with a focus on communication delivery goals that focused solely on reach (did I hit you?) and frequency (how many times did I hit you?).

Though creative teams certainly spend some amount of time considering the quality of the communication, the amount of time spent with a brand as a result of that quality was not even a thought. How could it be, when the units of advertising "product" are discrete?

No matter how good a 30-second spot is, a person seeing that ad cannot spend any more time with the brand in that environment than anyone else. And media people, well, how the hell are you going to account "time spent" in any real, quantifiable fashion that can be put in a media plan? Advertising boils down to the number of targets hit and how hard you hit them.

Advertising has become a game of dodge ball, with advertisers throwing the ball and the consumer doing everything he or she can to avoid getting hit.

But now, from the oldest continually operating advertising agency in the world, comes the proclamation that "time is the new currency." The objective now is to coax people into spending more time with a brand.

The only way to get this done, as I'm sure you've guessed by now, is integration with a digital effort. For the time being, anyway, I cannot get more engagement with my brand out of an audience than the current allotted time.

Print is a little better here, insofar as an individual can read your copy and look at your images over and over again for as long as he or she wants. But the protocol is still fixed.

Online, I am not confined by time and space. Online, I can fill both the hours and the imaginations of those who come seeking brand engagement for as long as they chose to be engaged.

Entertainment advertisers have taken advantage of this regularly over the years since the Internet became an ad medium. Product with such a short shelf life needs to live beyond its location of primary engagement if it seeks to maximize its value. A film seen once is great when millions and millions see it. But a film that creates a community of people interested in it, allows those people to engage it, and lives beyond being seen once in a theater, only needs tens of thousands of enthusiasts to find it.

More and more pharmaceutical companies are using the Internet as the primary point for distributing information, letting the television serve as a "teaser" to solicit a more active engagement on the part of the audience and thereby creating the conditions for more time spent with the audience and the development of a more quality relationship.

Bob Jeffrey is on to something, though its specific form is still in question. There is no doubt, however, that online is both the inspiration for the idea and the place where it will be realized.