In the late 1990s, as dot-coms were sprouting right and left and entrepreneurs wanted nothing other than to be first, the phrase "Internet time" entered the public lexicon.
Of course, the
subsequent dot-com bust made some rethink whether speed was really all it was cracked up to be -- especially if the race to be first made people overlook little matters, like profitability plans.
But, in at least one respect, Internet time is making a comeback: online ads.
Faster, shorter ads are definitely better for the Web than the traditional 30-second TV spot -- at least, so
said Carat Americas' CEO David Verklin at a panel discussion about online publishing this morning in New York City.
Citing a Mark Twain quote -- which went something like, "If I had had more
time, I would have made this letter shorter," -- Verklin presented a case for keeping online ads snappy. "The shorter the ad, the better the user experience, the more they like it," he told an
audience of several hundred at the Reuters building in Times Square.
A natural corollary of running shorter ads is that marketers need to get away from measuring the success of online
campaigns by evaluating how much time viewers spend watching the spot. "Time spent," Verklin said, "is really not the measure that should be guiding our experience."
Verklin made his comments
at a forum hosted by the Online Publishers Association, at which the group presented recent research looking at how and why consumers go online. One of the findings, as reported in
OnlineMediaDaily ("OPA, Web Ads a Draw for Many Consumers," June 2), is that Web users enjoy many of the online ads.
Some consumers state that the ads give them ideas for shopping,
gifts, or entertainment, said Todd McCauley of Northwestern University's Media Management Center (which fielded the research) this morning. On the other hand, Internet users also dislike pop-ups, or
ads that move across the page, distracting them from the reason they're online.
If marketers want to keep the goodwill that some online consumers have already extended with regards to ads, it
seems obvious that a re-purposed 30-second television ad is the wrong way to go.
While it might take longer to create a five-second ad than re-run a spot already prepared for TV, it's better
for agencies to spend their time making new ads than to ask consumers to spend their time re-watching ads online they already saw on television.