A Short Tale; the Digital 30
In my almost 15 years in digital marketing, I’ve often had to sigh, “Why didn’t I think of that?” The visionaries that have led this industry for so many years – Jobs, Bezos, those guys at Google, Morgan, Yang and many, many less well-known but brilliant folks – have inspired my awe and even jealously.
Today, however, I’m feeling pretty safe that David Payne will not be added to that list. A digital 30-second spot that runs between web pages, hum don’t know how I could have missed that. Are we going back to when www meant Worldwide Wait? Marketing that gets in between the consumer and content in a medium where that same consumer can, with one click, find that content elsewhere; seems counterproductive. Do you hear me Reuters?
No wait – I get it – Payne doesn’t know about the ability to just click away. He’s been watching too many of those holographic maps that Anderson Cooper plays with on CNN. Or he thinks the real value of the Digital 30 is in its ability to enable advertisers to amortize the costs of those million-dollar 30-second spots over one more part of the media buy.
Now this might have worked in 1999, before Clients had gotten the idea of measuring the response to their media and online consumers hadn’t learned they were in control. Will Clients stop asking for CTR/CPC/CPT now that they have gotten so used to them? Not to mention brand engagement metrics. How will the ROI of the Digital 30 be measured in a medium where the currency of success is engagement? Not clicking away? Watching the whole thing? Or if it is clickable, leaving in the middle and is that even good?
Yes, here I’m again totally lacking the vision. But then it could be the vision of the blind leading the blind.
