• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, August 22, 2005

Oh, did I have a goooood one for you this week: My own disquieting RM-themed version of "The Aristocrats" joke that would have sent Gilbert Gottfried to the window for air. Sadly, management got wind at the last second and reduced my masterpiece to one predictable, sanitized word, which might in fact describe the point of the joke better than any four letter word: Timing.

I know, I know, not exactly a side-splitter, but I think it's as fundamental a principal for the comic as it is for the marketer, the manager, and the deployment of creative.

Online marketers, you see, will spend all their energy making sure the right ad appears in the right place, but then leave the critical timing of the ad/consumer interaction to the design team and quality of the technology available. Unfortunately, either from lack of attention to detail or constraints that existing technology places on the speed and fluidity of bandwidth, most ads bomb on the stage that is my computer screen. Oh well.

Good timing is essential for more than just ads. For example, reacting to last week's RM column, PointRoll's CEO, Christopher Saridakis wrote to say how amiss I was to have accused PointRoll of debasing innovation by giving away RM formats at banner ad rates. His rationale for letting marketers trade up on the cheap is as old as marketing itself: Give away some premium-brand turkey until consumers can't remember how they ever tolerated the old stuff. Then, charge them for it. And while we agree that this tactic is a proven adoption booster and that RM adoption needs boosting, we disagree on -- wait for it -- the timing.

Given the rate at which the relevance of Internet publishing is growing and ad dollars are flooding the market, the most appropriate role for existing insiders to play is that of ambassador, not bargain-basement auctioneer. Saridakis says the industry is at a "tipping point," and I couldn't agree more. At a moment when the world is banging louder and louder at rich media's gates, the industry needs its leaders heralding the value of its products, not diminishing them.

Rather than rattle off Jupiter's RM spending forecasts to illustrate the industry's health ($4.5 billion in 2010), I'll direct your attention to AOL, a company that until just recently was a sleeping giant. The company is now awake and hell-bent on success -- on making Mamma Warner proud. And it all depends on ad revenue. The company has toppled its walls and will soon offer salivating marketers some 30 new ad formats of every imaginable shape and size. It's got streaming video and ads that wrap a brand 360 degrees around a user's computer screen; the ads start at a half a million dollars. eMarketer is predicting that, all told, advertisers will spend over $200 million on AOL this year, an astounding 64 percent year-over-year increase.

The point is that adoption is occurring in a big way regardless of whether PointRoll gives the stuff away or not. As a result, the sites where consumers spend most of their time will get more and more crowded with ever more attention-hungry ads. In such an environment, marketers will have to spend more for exclusivity and/or more compelling ads to get their messages across. Success will depend on the perfectly timed, perfectly toned pitch. Anything less will be -- wait for it -- just a joke.