• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, April 15, 2016

One thing leads to another, in ways you can’t always guess. As so many smartphone users now use apps and social media to communicate, share-worthy ads -- the kind that make Super Bowl memories and start conversations about Dove soap and the like -- are changing, too.

“The move toward apps takes ads away from broader distribution to narrower,” says Sarah Wood, the co-CEO of Unruly, the ad tech firm that makes a business out of the “science of sharing.”

We’re now more likely to discover a clever ad a friend sends us on Facebook, or a Vine, or whatever. But sharing those ads may not be as quickly recognized, because a lot of it is going on via one-to-one messaging, too. It might be that heart-tugging ads get passed around just as much, Wood thinks, but it may not seem to be recognized with the same viral hysteria that was true even a year or two ago.

And, Wood says, because of Facebook, advertisers are “placing even more emphasis on the visual. This is huge from all kinds of standpoints. More than ever, advertisers have to think about memorable video.”

That’s because audio is becoming secondary, she thinks. Because of Facebook auto-play and separately, the preference by mobile viewers for audio-less advertising, Wood says “the future is close-captioning”  where the words used to be.

And when I think of it, she’s got a good point.

It’s gotten common for ads--even the ordinary "spoken" commercials you can still see online--to be captioned throughout. The shorter ads do their business with a recognizable visual that can tell you, without words, what’s being pitched, in just a second or two. They’re more like billboards.  

Wood thinks the idea for that is exemplified--and maybe even grew out of--the very familiar scene from the film “Downfall,” in which actor Bruno Ganz as Adolph Hitler recognizes Berlin is about to fall, and that the Third Reich is doomed. It may not have been the first Internet meme, but it certainly has become one of the most versatile--there are thousands of parodies of the scene, and even one in which “Hitler” is reacting violently to the parodies themselves.

That video, she thinks, may have been the unrecognized impetus for enterprising creative directors to realize how captioned ads can, with instantly recognizable video, stand on their own.

Now, she thinks, “Close-captioning is both an necessity and an opportunity. We are at the beginning of a revolution in advertising content.”

Advertisers need to recognize ads are being perceived differently, and as a part of a larger whole. The short mobile ad might only need to be a few seconds long to remind a viewer of the longer commercial it is referencing.  She thinks Steve Harvey’s ad for T-Mobile does a brilliant job, by recalling his Miss Universe flub to make a comical point about suspect claims other mobile providers make.

But on a mobile screen, a brief clip from that Steve Harvey commercial tells the whole story in about two seconds. 

pj@mediapost.com