• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, September 29, 2005

Creating television ads is often a matter of presenting a narrative or telling a joke to a captive audience. But neither of those strategies are well-suited to advertising on the Internet, said advertising executives Wednesday afternoon at OMMA East.

"If we're just sticking 30-second spots online, then we're missing something bigger," said Nick Law, executive creative director at R/GA, at the panel about creating ads for the Web.

That's just one of the hurdles facing agency creatives. Another significant problem, Law said, is that consumers--those without TiVo, anyway--have no choice about viewers seeing at least some of the ads pushed their way. But online, where users pull media to them, consumers aren't likely to seek out 30-second ads.

Yet an additional barrier facing the interactive ad industry is that client-side marketing executives often view the Internet differently than people immersed in the digital world. "Most of those clients don't live on the Internet," said Paul Tilley, senior vice president and group creative director at DDB Chicago. "We create a campaign ... and then somebody says, 'Oh yeah, we should stuff some of that into banner ads.'"

R/GA's Law added that when traditional marketing executives attempt to get involved with the Web, the result is like "dentists trying to understand veterinary science."

Tilley proposed that the disconnect may be generational, with client executives generally older than today's digitally savvy Gen Ys. And, he offered, many marketing executives are so used to thinking in terms of television ads that anything else seems wrong. "Psychologically, to not go to television makes a lot of clients feel like they're out of society," he said.