IAB Engage Conference: Here Comes The Advertorial

The Internet Advertising Bureau’s Engage conference went down yesterday, in a week where the media industry is thoroughly unimpressed with the returns from online advertising. Those who believe in well-funded, independent journalism, television, radio, film and digital content – look away now.

AOL’s president of global advertising and strategy, Jeff Levick, built up content creators’ hopes before dashing them within a single speech. He appealed to brands to spend more online, and in more innovative and fragmented ways in order to deal with a niche, fragmented audience. The days of chucking a few ideas at billboards and the X Factor breaks are over: “Niche is the new mass”. If they heed his words, that means a more diverse pattern of investment from advertisers, broken up across the media landscape, from brands that are starting to really have faith in online as a place to create sales. That means a bigger spend, and more cash for more people.

But then the classic nightmarish vision for content producers presented itself once more: Levick said there was “a real opportunity to mash advertising closer to content creation… Over the next 12 months we’re going to see advertising sit much closer to the content”. His ugly choice of words is apt: he’s encouraging that nirvana for brands where the audience is receiving “content” funded by the advertiser, advertorial in other words.

It’s almost unfashionable to speak out against this these days, and that there’s a kind of snobbery in doing so – suggesting that content should be independent of commerce is beginning to be seen as quaint, elitist, even Luddite. Brands often frame this content/advertising mashing as a win-win situation, giving consumers content that they want while getting brands closer to consumers than ever before; and they’re pushing this line hard, as if it’s inevitable and the only format they’re willing to pay a decent premium for. But I’m not convinced by this. Do consumers really enjoy cookery shows where chefs open jars of Dolmio, for instance? There needs to be some very indepth research into audience attitudes to advertorial content before brands can start pushing it as gospel.

Subtle product placement, while arguably more sinister and insidious, is still much better for consumers than the experience of a heavily, blithely branded TV show, book, or concert – when the pockets of pure experience afforded by art and entertainment become smoothed into a constant arc of commerce, is when life becomes very depressing indeed.

Then there’s Ashley Highfield, Microsoft’s UK MD, cosying up to the room and saying that advertising will remain the chief source of revenue for online content producers – and in his vision of the future, the TV screen will give way to a world of screens with video content embedded all around us. Fair enough, but the question here has to be: given the level of engagement from the consumer with targeted online advertising and increasing levels of online video advertising, why are the premiums so much lower than for passive mass-media adverts?

Elsewhere in his speech, his future screen-world leaves Hollywood adaptations of Philip K Dick novels with a lot to answer for, and he said “ubiquitous and disposable” low-end netbooks would provide a constant stream of video content – hmm, doesn’t exactly sound wonderfully sustainable though. 

And elsewhere in the conference, nascent new media guru Stephen Fry was wheeled out to talk about Twitter, mobile evangelists of various stripes tried to get people not just to think about the iPhone, and Mark Lund, chief exec of the Central Office of Information, said that he wanted to join up citizens and the government better via the internet, and that digital is “the plasma that runs through media ecology”. Lovely, unprofitable plasma.

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | November 12, 2009 12:40PM |