Download Interactive Television

HAUTE ECOLE “Groupe ICHEC – ISC ST-Saint-Louis – ISFSC”
EUROPEAN MASTER IN MULTIMEDIA AND AUDIOVISUAL BUSINESS
ADMINISTRATION (E.M.M.A.B.A.)
Academic year 1999-2000
“Organised in Brussels with the support of the European Union’s Media II
Programme and in Co-operation with the University of Metz, the New University of
Lisbon, the University of Athens, the University of Paris 8, Kemi-Tornio
Polytechnic, Lapland University”
Interactive Television:
Setting New Boundaries in Television Advertising
Author: Pedro Motta da Silva
Thesis Supervisor: Fotini H. Sfakianaki, Ph.D
Date: October 2001
European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
Abstract
Interactive Television possesses enough features to completely change the way
"old" Television Advertising is planned, bought and ultimately made. Many of these
new characteristics descend from the technology behind the so-called "New
Media".
In this report, we discuss the idea that the concepts and business models of "old"
Television Advertising have to evolve. We argue that, although it is most likely that
future business models will be based on those operating on the Internet, the
technical and social capabilities of the Interactive Television will soon wear out
those models.
In this paper's approach, we defend that it is through new grammars, linguistics
and ultimately types of adverts that Interactive Television Advertising efforts will
become rewarding, both for the advertiser and most importantly to the consumer.
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
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Acknowledgments
One of my favourite things in life is teamwork! I remember being a kid and hearing
the coach of my football team insisting that the player who had the ball could not
do much if the others did not search for clear passing positions.
As I grew up, I developed a passion for audiovisual and later the multimedia
working fields, both of which depend crucially on team work. Fortunately, during
the past years, I was given the chance to experience loads of different working
teams. From all of them I treasure the best memories, no matter what my task
was! At the end of the day, it always feels like a victory, even when we have to
redo some work.
I would like to point that, although the report that you are about to read only has
my tutors’ name and mine on the front cover, it was nurtured by a big team. From
the early stages of this work, this team played in the backstage, as my “roadies”!
My family, friends, working and ex-working colleagues managed to provide me
conditions so that I could set up the working environment I needed to focus on this
work.
Some of these persons overcharged themselves with tasks, so that I could have a
little bit of extra time. Others provided me the tools to do so, even if that meant that
for weeks or months, they would have no computer to work, check their e-mails, or
simply browse the Net (Richy, you’re a Star!).
Others are part of my life, meaning that they are next to me everyday and have
always been there, ready to hear and support me when I need, but also able to
criticise me when I need to be criticised. My family alongside with my friends
compose this last group. I cannot find a word or sentence that summarises the
appreciation I feel for them.
Put it this way, what I am today is in a sense their fault too!
Having said that, I would like to thank the following:
My Tutor Fotini Sfakianaki who, from Greece via e-mail and chats, managed to
supervise and organise my ideas. That meant extra working hours (not just
because of time difference) and the double effort of not only guiding me but trying
to understand my English…

Irene de Almeida, Sonia Vilar Leal, Célia Quico, David Estebe, João Tocha, Nuno
Virgilio for all the data, information, formal and informal discussions.
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
I would also like to thank the following institutions for providing me materials to use
as examples: Novaga Produção de Filmes Lda, Tokaki™, Publicis - Publicidade
Lda.
On another level (if not the most important!): my family, Ricardo Tabosa, The
Wonder Sisters, my 2nd family, the staff @ E.B. 2,3 S.P.G. and the guys @ S.M.M.
(Thanks for waiting, shall we “Rock-and-Roll” now!).
Muito obrigado!
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
To:
Luísa and Luís,
my parents and much more than friends!
Álvaro Carlos and Mário,
my long departed grandparents!
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
Preface
“Interactive Television Setting New Boundaries in Television Advertising” is a new
stage of an idea that occurred to me a few years ago when I was designing CDROMs on my 2nd year at the University. At that time, a colleague and me struggled
to get our messages on screen in an interactive way. The problem then was (and
still is in many cases) that we were used to be presented things, and so was our
audience.
At that time, we were facing many problems with our products, content, design and
technical problems amongst others. I remember making progresses everyday for
weeks, but I also remember compromising our work everyday by dropping and
changing something that we have just found the works for, something new, a new
approach, a new challenge. As what we were working was something new for us,
our enthusiasm just kept building everyday. Therefore, we would get excuses to
not giving the work as finished. Instead we decided to keep on with the fun.
Eventually we managed to work some video clips as hypervideo – I am talking
about small sized screens in which one could mouse-click some areas and
therefore “surf”, not only the video, but also the rest of the product (CD-ROM).
Quickly we were alerted to the fact that maybe the navigation of our product
should not rely only on this feature, simply because no one would be familiarised
with it. We did not have to think hard to see that it was a fair critique and so we
dropped the video as a navigation tool. Though I will never forget the enthusiasm
around this simple hypervideo experiment, and from that day onwards I started to
pay more attention to non-linear narratives. After all, it had become clear to me
that it is something very powerful in terms of audience engagement but also very
complicated in terms of conception and production.
When Interactive Television became “buzzing” in the Portuguese scene, I was
working on an advertising agency, and soon all my enthusiasm came back. I
started some research trying to find out how much interactive was this new
Television. I found out that it is still a bit far away from my “much dreamed”
television. Nevertheless, the fact that I was working in advertising made me see
more audience engaging features other than the dreamed one, such as: SelfProgramming, Games, Video-on-Demand (V.D.O.), amongst others.
On the other hand, it was obvious that a lot had to be changed in advertising the
way I knew it. But more importantly the changes had to be done in the way “my
agency”, our clients and me were doing advertising – if not by any other reason,
simply because on Interactive Television the user can easily bypass the adverts.
I am not working in advertising anymore: for the good or the bad, I think a needed
distance between a loved job and a powerful new tool was achieved. A tool that
can be as much of a threat to the advertising business as Mp3 was considered to
be for the music industries. I think it all comes down to looking at these
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
developments as new tools and not exclusively as enemies’ weapons, as in a
sense the Mp3 file format was seen.
With these pages, I hope to uncover just a little bit of the sheet that is plastering
this embryo and still fragile new media advertising world. At the moment, it is
impossible to predict its shape, format, platform or the number of buttons the
remote control of this new heavy weight tool is going to have. To be honest, I
really do not care nor do I think the physical aspect and works of this future
monster is that relevant for the following argument. The only think I know is that
there is no turning back! I am sure that in a few years we will be able to do
hypervideo “surfing” on some device – whether it is a TV or a PC or a Microwave
we will see. The only thing I know for sure at the moment is that there are loads of
characteristics of “old television” that do not fit on this “new television” media. I
also know that many need to be re-thought.
In a sense, what I am wiling to do with this work – “pinching” Michael Schrage’s
idea that “Advertising isn’t dead, it’s been reborn”1 – is to bring forward some key
issues about old advertising and confront them with these new media realities. If
Michael Schrage says, “Advertising isn’t dead, it’s been reborn”2, I dare adding “…
and it is a awful lot stronger than before”.
The writing of this work at the present appears under the context of my enrolment
on the European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration
(E.M.M.A.B.A.)3. As an MBA (Master Business Administration) course, it is
requested that the students develop some work in the Business Administration
area.
So Interactive Television appeared as the ideal subject, once that Portugal is
known to have been chosen by Microsoft to be testing country for their Web based
TV-platform. As such Portugal is not a pioneer in the Interactive Television field
but with the backing of Microsoft it is set to become a future case study in the field.
Interactive Television, or whatever evolution the concept might undertake in the
future, is a very powerful media and as such drags many industries behind it. One
of these industries is the advertising industry, which is also known for having a
very close relationship with television since its appearance.
As a new media, Interactive Television appears to require business models that
we know and have been used for advertising to be re-thought or even re-defined.
1
Is Advertising Dead? (p. 1)
Ibid. (p. 1)
3 Organised in Brussels with the support of the European Union’s Media II Programme and in Cooperation with the University of Metz, the New University of Lisbon, the University of Athens, the
University of Paris 8, Kemi-Tornio Polytechnic, Lapland University
2
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
In a content context, it is obvious that, in the last few years, new ways of
advertising have appeared and somehow came to close the gap between
technological developments and audience behaviours – new ways of advertising
such as Bartering, Product Placement and Sponsorship, amongst others, are
having its “holy” days.
But the point is that the technology behind Interactive Television (ITV) completely
changes the way one watches television. Furthermore, it completely changes the
way one does advertising or, if not, it is going to confront advertising with new
challenges.
One is on his way to sooner or later start doing his own television and, if this
comes to prove right, then either one starts doing his own advertising or
advertising has done specifically for him.
Or, funniest of all, the coming true of one of the advertisers’ dreams, if advertising
is done by the advertiser and the consumer both together and at the same time.
What a “blast” this would be, above all quite engaging for the consumer.
Either way, one thing is for sure: television advertising needs some changes.
With this report, I hope I can bring up some new business models for ITV
advertising. As it is, after all, the scope of the course: to alert us to the changes in
the Audiovisual and Multimedia area and to their impact on the way the companies
in this area are ran.
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
Contents / Index
Abstract ................................................................................................................... 2
Acknowledgments ................................................................................................... 3
Preface .................................................................................................................... 6
Contents / Index ...................................................................................................... 9
Introduction ........................................................................................................ 11
Research Question and its Purpose .................................................................. 14
Methodology ...................................................................................................... 15
Part I ...................................................................................................................... 17
Introduction ........................................................................................................ 18
Overview of the advertising process .................................................................. 18
What is Advertising? ...................................................................................... 18
Who needs Advertising? ................................................................................ 19
Does the Consumer need Advertising? .......................................................... 19
Who does Advertising? .................................................................................. 20
What is an Advertising Agency? ..................................................................... 20
Listing down the advertising production stages inside an agency .................. 21
The Brief with the Client.............................................................................. 21
The Strategy ............................................................................................... 21
The Creative Part ....................................................................................... 22
The Production ........................................................................................... 22
The Testing................................................................................................. 22
The “Go Flight” ........................................................................................... 22
The players in the advertising business ............................................................. 22
The Client ....................................................................................................... 22
The consumers .............................................................................................. 22
The Advertisers .............................................................................................. 22
The Media Placement Companies ................................................................. 22
The communication means ................................................................................ 23
Mass Media .................................................................................................... 23
Old Media ....................................................................................................... 23
Television ....................................................................................................... 23
New Media ..................................................................................................... 24
Internet ........................................................................................................... 24
A new Mass Media? ................................................................................ 26
Interactive Television ......................................................................................... 28
Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 30
Part II ..................................................................................................................... 31
Introduction ........................................................................................................ 32
Interactivity......................................................................................................... 35
The concept of interactivity............................................................................. 36
The concept of pacing .................................................................................... 37
Communication .................................................................................................. 37
What is Communication ................................................................................. 37
Communication Feed ..................................................................................... 38
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
Models of Communication ................................................................................. 38
Linear models ......................................................................................... 38
One to mass (Media Oriented models) .......................................................... 40
Non-Linear Models .................................................................................. 42
One to one (Interpersonal Oriented) .............................................................. 42
Applying the communication models to advertising ........................................... 43
Traditional Advertising ....................................................................................... 44
The Shannon and Weaver model ................................................................... 44
Harold Lasswell Formula ................................................................................ 45
Gerbner Model ............................................................................................... 46
Osgood & Schramm Circular Model ............................................................... 46
Television advertising ..................................................................................... 46
Old Advertising ............................................................................................... 49
Television Media Placement & Strategy ..................................................... 50
Future Advertising .............................................................................................. 53
Internet Advertising ........................................................................................ 53
New Media Advertising .................................................................................. 64
Internet Media Placement & Strategy ......................................................... 65
Interactive Television Advertising ................................................................... 67
“Futuristic / Creative” Media Placement ...................................................... 70
Convergence or Advertising Mix? ...................................................................... 70
Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 71
Part III .................................................................................................................... 72
Introduction ........................................................................................................ 73
The Drawbacks of Nowadays Television Advertising ........................................ 75
The USP of New Media Advertising ................................................................... 77
Interactive Television Advertising ...................................................................... 78
Guidelines to Interactive Television Advertising ................................................. 78
The Economies behind Interactive Television.................................................... 80
Media Buying and Media Strategy / Planning for I -TV ...................................... 80
Business Models ................................................................................................ 81
Web Buying ....................................................................................................... 82
Video Buying ...................................................................................................... 83
Specialised Content Experts .............................................................................. 84
Real-Time Advertising Planning / Strategy & Buying ......................................... 86
Conclusions ....................................................................................................... 87
References / Bibliography .................................................................................. 88
Further Readings ............................................................................................... 91
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
Introduction
Recently I was having a conversation with my parents about technology and
progress. The funny thing about people is that everyone has its own view about
the same given subject. So there we were in the living room, the three of us,
obviously thinking differently about the same subject.
My father, who is a lawyer, sees his area of work having new challenges everyday,
not to talk about the changes on the working processes, now that a fair amount of
documents concerning laws and practical cases are online - I can somehow
predict that he is soon to join me and my group of online friends for late night
dialogues. I remember that a few years ago I was quite into investigating the Mp3
format and phenomenon. Firstly because of my final thesis, which was a study on
the outcomes of digital technology regarding its challenges to copyright and
authorship. Secondly because I have been playing in a band for years and Mp3
appeared to be a very good way to spread our “noise” widely without large
amounts of money or without some record deal (as if we had the chance to sign
one!). At that time, I recall him being rather inquisitive the moment he realised the
amount of threats the movement and the format were putting together to the
industry and the artists themselves. Although he does not do much work directly
related to copyright issues, he does get reflexes of technology in many of his
cases.
My mother, who is a translator, recalled me of the years that I used to skateboard
to one of our national newspapers to pick up or to deliver some of her typewritten
works. How things have changed! She now receives and sends some of her work
via E-mail, and I think one of the main reasons for some of the work not being
processed that way is a “fictional” need she has to go out and meet some of the
people she works for. Needless to say, but the type machine she used for twenty
years is somewhere in the house and meanwhile she had to buy three computers.
Not that she needed a new or faster machine to do her work, but some of the
software her clients use set the need for a better machine every-now-and-then.
At some point, we remembered one Christmas that we gave my cousins two CDROMs: one was an illustrated book about the white bear and the other was a set
of word games. Obviously I sat down in front of the computer with one cousin each
side and prepared myself to spend some hours with them going around the two
discs. Guess what: the moment the white bear disc was running they found their
own path and the food on the dinner table needed me more than the two kids. The
only surprise they had that evening, other than the Christmas presents, was when
I told them that I was doing the same sort of work that was on those two discs,
“Really”, they said, without even imagining that, at that time, very little educational
“multimedia” had been done so far. Evidently I could not expect another answer:
ever since they were born, CD-ROMs are discs either blank or pre-recorded (e.g.games), which you can buy in a shop – that is the way they see it.
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
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As we three laughed reminding this episode, a flash came onto my head; “Jesus, I
was born with television”. I mean I was alive when the remote control and video
recorders appeared, but television already existed in Portugal when I was born.
Actually television exists in Portugal ever since 1957, when Radio Televisão
Portuguesa RTP started with regular broadcastings. I don’t think the castings were
broad at the time. Probably they should be considered narrow castings not
because they where restricted in terms of access but because only few people
could afford to have such device in their living room.
So regarding television I am a bit like my cousins. It already existed when I was
born. Nevertheless, I was fortuned enough to have witnessed many evolutions
such as home video recorders satellite and cable, amongst others, as well as
social mutations. I actually think I can be considered to be a member of the socalled MTV generation – whether that is good or not is another story.
Anyway, according to a study made in 1998 by AGB Portugal, approximately 99%
of the Portuguese households have a television set, 98% of those households
have colour television sets and 88% use remote control. According to the 1997
European Media Fact Book, 59% of the households have at least two televisions 4.
With such framing, I think we can use with no doubts the term “broadcasting”.
When looking at the numbers, we easily recognise that the spread of television in
our “occidental” world was quite impressive, though we must not forget that the
timeframe is big, approximately 50 years – meaning that half of the last century
was the time it took for television to spread. But 50 years at the pace we
nowadays live is a lot of time, specially regarding technology developments. If we
take a look to Table-1 Nua Surveys “How Many Online” (www.nua.com), we can
get a picture of the spreading pace of Internet.
Date
December 2000
September 1999
December 1998
December 1997
December 1996
Number (in Millions)
418.59
201.05
150
101
55
% Population
6.89 %
4.78 %
3.67 %
2.47 %
1.34 %
Table 1- Nua Surveys “How Many Online”5
Obviously, as we can see, Internet user growth stampeded in the last 5 years. It is
still miles away from those numbers of television, but it grows fast every day.
Nevertheless, much of the potential of Internet cannot be represented through its
user numbers or advertising and marketing numbers6. This is mostly due to the
fact that these numbers relate only to one part of the Internet – the World Wide
All figures taken from the book Publicitor (p. 333)
(Modified) Table available online at Nua Surveys
6 See The Internet Adverting under Future Advertising
4
5
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
Web (also known as WWW or WEB) – leaving aside quite a horizon. We are not
going to talk about those areas in this report. We will focus on the common user
oriented, the cyberspace.
Going back to television and backed by the presented numbers, one could claim
that television has become over the past 50 years a part of our social lives. Soap
operas, contests and sports, amongst others, pushed by the strength of a big
advertising industry and together with some passiveness inherent to the human
being, made television the ultimate message spreading device. Whether the
broadcasted messages are good or not is another story. Nevertheless, if we
combine this social aspect of television with some of the technology behind the
Web, we will get a very powerful new media. It is on this new media and its
relation to advertising that this report is focused.
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
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Research Question and its Purpose
At the moment, several questions about, or on, the subject of Interactive
Television can be asked. Research sounds like the only way to get some answers.
Though, in my opinion, many questions cannot be answered at the present not
even with deep research. Some of these questions will only find answers in the
future, which is obviously not what one wants to ear, especially if the subject
involves large amounts of money.
That is what happens in the advertising industry and the sooner it gets some
answers the better for everyone involved in the area. With this pages, I hope to
raise some questions, and provide some answers, on how media Strategy /
Planning and Buying will have to evolve to fit this new scenario of ITV. Obviously
one cannot answer the proposed question without raising many more on the way. I
will do my best not to get lost on the various topics and subjects that we are going
to approach on our analyses.
Nevertheless, what I hope, more than providing answers, is to raise awareness
regarding such big amount of subjects that Interactive Television is going to threat
and challenge. If I manage to do this, then I’ll be happy; if on the way I manage to
provide some answers, then I will be delighted.
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
Methodology
To research topics such as the ones which are about to be putted forward in this
project was, in a sense, a bit of a detective’s work! There are some reasons to
make such statement and the first is that there are not many books printed on the
subject of Interactive Television. Though it should be said that from 2000, year
when I started to pay some more attention to the subject, until now some books
were published. The problem with them is that, like “fashion”, their price is too
high.
Also the relationship between advertising and interactive television is still being
discovered, i.e. many of the studies that appeared meanwhile are almost
considered “top-secret” information. As such, either they are not available for
individuals or, being cutting edge research and technology, they are mainly
targeted large dollars institutions, group where I am not obviously included. It
makes sense that the studies are so expensive – after all, it is a new business and
everyone wants to play it (have a go on it)!
So, my research was done based mostly on Internet and magazine articles.
Researching on Internet should not be regarded as synonym of free, easy-to-get
and available-for-everyone information! Far from that, especially in this field, but it
proved, on some sites, that “persistence” is a key word never to be discarded. On
other sites, a simple act like that of becoming a “registered user” helped a lot…
Wonder why?
Obviously my research line started very wide and broad. As the work evolved,
redundant and repeated information started to be unconsciously thrown way. Soon
the number of sites relevant for my research became smaller, but in comparison
the depth of information increased to very high levels. Still, it should be pointed
that in, Internet terms, the concept regarding the notions of information quantity
and information quality as described above is very relative. Fortunately or
unfortunately, the Internet, the information superhighway as it became known, still
gives us dead-ends every now and then.
Even so, and since the scope of this work is focused on television advertising and
possible changes in its process due to Interactive Television, it appears
appropriate to set some definitions.
As the nature of the topics to be covered in the following pages is so diverse, and
to avoid unwanted effects, instead of providing a list of definitions at the start,
these will be provided as the depth of analyses increases and the need for them
appears. Nevertheless, the definitions that are going to be presented, as we go
along the text, are not intended to dissect all that is related to Advertising,
Television and so on!
The idea is to set “working definitions” so that the reader can correctly frame the
analyses regarding the topics and the arguments that are being presented.
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
There are times when the definitions used are far from being the most
comprehensive and complete, or even the most important ones, but some choices
had to be made in order to, and above all, conceive succinct arguments on the
topics in such small amount of pages.
I decided to organise the work under three different sections. Under each section
there is an introduction to the topic, followed by a development and a conclusion.
Part 1 will deal with questions related to advertising in which an overview of the
advertising process will be given.
Part 2 will focus on communication and its process relating it to advertising both in
old “traditional” and “new” media.
Part 3 will work as a sum up of the two first parts where I hope some conclusions
will be drawn regarding the economics behind Interactive Television, Business
Models and some guideline settings to Interactive Television Advertising.
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
Part I
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
Introduction
In this first part, we are going to talk about advertising, covering the stages and the
players behind this activity. Towards the end, we will talk about the media and we
will emphasize the scope of this thesis work by creating awareness to the
television phenomenon.
Overview of the advertising process
What is Advertising?
According to Collins Cobuild dictionary, advertising is “… the activity of telling
people about products, events, or job vacancies, and making them want to buy the
products, go to the events, or apply for the jobs.”7. This notion is not obviously
exhaustive or complete; by synthesising several publications and for the sake of
this argument, advertising could be defined as a “group of operations that are
related to the broadcasting of a commercial message, with the primary objective of
making people buying one specific product”.
According to the book Publicitor, it is accepted that the first traces of adverts
appeared in Pompeii, Italy, where some boards with inscriptions regarding
gladiator fights and the directions to the city’s public services were found. Though
one must agree that, unless the emperor wanted to publicise his pro-society work,
these two situations are not, at least to our modern times, very good examples.
However, the book points out word games and bidding as the oldest forms of
advertising, or if not, the way everything started. And it does make sense that, in
its beginning, it was based mostly in one’s imagination. Especially if one tries to
visualize how the medieval fairs were: apart from being very bad smelling places,
we would get loads of vendors trying to sell their products, which were exactly the
same as the vendor next to him. Hence, it is easy to envision that all of them
started to draw on their imagination in order to make the words they used noticed
amongst themselves. Obviously that there is a gap between these examples of
self-promotion and what we nowadays know as advertising. Nevertheless, word
games and bidding are still used everywhere in fairs (and personally that is one of
the aspects of fairs that attracts me).
Through time jumping some centuries and some big cultural changes, such as
political, physical and technological, amongst others, one can envision that the
main engines for advertising to become the machine that we now know were the
industrial revolution, the Ford revolution, the urbanization and, last but not least,
the developments in the communication means, as the same book points out.
7
Collins Cobuild (p. 27)
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
We could say that advertising started last century and since then has been in
constant evolution. Very recently, in the last half of this century, it conquered a
very powerful machine widely known as Television. The importance of television
and the reasons for it will be analysed further in this text.
Going back to advertising, we can easily consider it a very powerful industry,
although its works can sometimes create funny paradigms, as Helen Katz points:
“Yet despite the fact that no one has yet proven “how advertising works,”
businesses continue to believe in its power, as evidenced by the $138 billion spent
in this country on advertising in 1993”8 (U.S. Numbers).
In my opinion, the advent of new technologies and its use in advertising made it
somehow more accurate. This report deals with this shifting.
Who needs Advertising?
In the beginning, leaving aside the Romans and their archaic ways of making
themselves noticed, it was mainly companies who had the need to become
noticed, especially those who produced goods (clothes, washing-soaps, etc.). It’s
easy to imagine that consumer oriented products were the beginning of it.
Then, as our society evolved, it became easier for those companies to spread their
products widely, but also and at the same time, markets were beginning to
develop. So new kinds of communication needs appeared: for example, it simply
became inefficient for big companies to make self-promotion only locally. So
slowly their communication had to be geographically enlarged.
Also the need for a corporative image started to emerge and, later, branding
became a key factor in our consumers’ world. This last category found excellent
communication tools on the new media – e.g. Internet (as we will see later in this
work, How is it Accountable, when discussing briefly the results of a report of the
Internet Advertising Bureau about Internet advertising effectiveness).
Does the Consumer need Advertising?
This is a very tricky question that could easily mislead us on our argument. Helen
Katz defends that “Advertising in the media performs the dual role of informing and
entertaining. It informs us of the goods and services that are available for us to
purchase and use. And, along the way, it often, entertains us with some
humorous, witty, or clever use of words and pictures”.9
That is why advertising is not and will never be clean and un-biased information,
although some adverts claim to be so. Advertising messages, adverts, are mostly
8
9
The Media Book (p. 5)
The Media Book (p. 5)
19
European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
if not completely 100% biased. Also, as we will see further on this report, they are
as well, in my opinion, full of redundant information (See Models of
Communication – Shannon and Weaver Model and Applying the Communication
Models to Advertising).
Nevertheless, there is a need for advertising amongst the consumers that can be
as simple as the one pointed by Michael Schrage, “Since its invention, mass
media has always been subsidized by advertising. The Sunday newspaper that
comes to your door may cost $8 or more to manufacture and deliver, but it only
costs you $1.50; the balance is paid by advertisers all hoping to catch a glance
from you on your way to the sports scores or the local real estate offerings. You
can buy Time for as little as $1.09 an issue only because advertisers are willing to
spend upwards of $140,000 to place a single page of advertising”10. Basically, the
author defends that advertising makes the media affordable and media is a
synonym of information, entertainment and so on.
We can also argue that the consumer needs to be informed and as such
advertising is also a need. One thing has happened – new media such as Internet
have enabled some behavioural changes in the consumer. These happened
mostly because technologies enable a power shift on who has the control. Even if
this change does not mean more power to the consumer, at least it means that
consumers can now better drive their choices. Comparison buying has become as
simple as a mouse click can be. And that, mixed with some more elements that we
are going to talk about, made, or should have made, advertising people in general
to rethink many aspects of their activity.
Who does Advertising?
Advertising is done by advertisers, which is intended to be a ”… person or
company that pays for a product, event, or job vacancy to be advertised in a
newspaper, on television, or on posters.”11. Advertising is usually done by
companies, the advertising agencies. This has mostly to do with the fact that it is
very difficult, if not impossible, apart some peculiar examples, for advertising to be
a one-man job only. Actually advertising is now more than ever teamwork, as we
will see further on the definition of advertising agency and more in depth on the
way advertising and the media are evolving.
What is an Advertising Agency?
A definition for agency could be “… a business which provides a service on behalf
of other businesses”12. As such, an advertising agency can be first described as a
business that provides advertising campaigns, adverts and corporation
communication to companies.
10
Is Advertising Dead? (p. 6)
Collins Cobuild (p. 27)
12 Collins Cobuild (p. 34)
11
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
According to the 2nd article of the technical regulations of the Portuguese
Association of Advertising Agencies (A.P.A.P.), an advertising agency is a
company, “which only produces activities related to advertising”. Moreover, the
same regulations state that it has to have “skilled collaborators and whose work is
capable to provide several clients at the same time services in various fields such
as marketing analyses, conception and creation, planning and distribution, buying
and control of advertising campaigns”13.
Since an agency works on “… behalf of …”14 their clients, it is intended that it does
not have the power of decision, though it should be able to, as João Sacchetti
points out “… anticipate … all the communication process.”15.
“Anticipation” is one of the key words in the media industry, which also applies with
strong emphasis to advertising. As such, anticipation appears to be, for agencies,
a winning strategy to enter the Interactive Television advertising, as we will see
later on this report. But it is important to state that this anticipation or set of
anticipation tasks will be mostly reflected on the internal works of an advertising
agency, as we will see in part 3.
To sum up, an advertising agency is a company in which people from various
fields work in all the stages of the advertising process. It might be easier to
understand the working fields and its missions if they appear listed.
Listing down the advertising production stages inside an agency
Advertising is usually seen as a group of tasks that involves many people working
on very distinct areas, to accomplish the final product – “Advert” or “Advertising
Campaign”. The process of advertising can be roughly broken down on to the
following stages:
The Brief with the Client
This is where everything starts. The client has a communication need and meets
with an Advertising Agency to help fulfil that need.
The Strategy
The agency knowing the client’s problem starts creating a communication strategy
to overcome it, and proposes that strategy to the client.
13
A.P. A.P. Regulations in Publicidade e Comunicação (p. 16)
Collins Cobuild (p. 34)
15 Publicidade e Comunicação (p. 16)
14
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
The Creative Part
With a communication strategy thought and accepted, the agency has to find ways
not only to reach an audience but also to create the biggest impact possible. Once
the creative is accepted, we move on to the production stage.
The Production
This is the stage, as the name says, in which the creative work is produced – e.g.
a film is shot and edited.
The Testing
Some big campaigns, exactly because they are so big and involve so much
investment, are pre-tested to be measured in terms of efficiency and to, if that is
the case, get some corrections done.
The “Go Flight”
The client gives his final approval; the advert is placed on the various media
already strategically chosen.
The players in the advertising business
The Client
We have already talked about it. Basically it resumes to the person, company or
institution that has a communication need.
The consumers
Our society, more or less segmented and more or less aware of the sort of desired
effect that exists in the messages shown.
The Advertisers
Already covered – the advertising agencies.
The Media Placement Companies
Media placement companies work as an intermediary between the advertising
agencies and the media. As they make buys in the media for a various number of
advertising agencies (representing several clients), they managed to achieve
better media prices.
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October 2001
The communication means
“Pop media, of course, have a rich tradition of subsidy: In the last century,
advertising brought mass affordability to the daily newspaper with the “penny
dreadfuls;” in this century, commercial sponsorship turned radio and then
television into dominant media”16.
In this section, we are going to talk about the communication means used in
advertising, although obviously not all of them. We are going to focus only on two:
an old media, Television, and a new media, Internet. But before moving to those
analyses, it is important to bring forward the notion of Mass Media
Mass Media
The term mass “... is used to describe something which involves or affects a very
large number of people”17.
According to Collins Cobuild, “You can refer to television, radio, newspapers and
magazines as the media”18.
As such, by combining these two words, we get to the term mass media which is
used to “... refer to the various ways, especially television, radio, newspapers, and
magazines, by which information and news is given to large numbers of
people...”19
As we can see, the technological developments are of a greater importance for the
advent of the concept of mass media! Especially if we think of radio and television
which broke the physical barrier of tangible media!
Old Media
Also referred in this text as Traditional Media, they relate – by direct comparison to
new media – to media that reach the masses regardless of the particular
individuals that form the audience. Old media typically do not offer any chance of
direct feedback and, moreover, they are very expensive either to produce or to
broadcast.
Television
“... Is a piece of electronic equipment consisting of a box with a glass screen on it
on which you can watch programmes with pictures and sounds.”20
16
Is Advertising Dead? (p. 2)
Collins Cobuild (p. 1023)
18 Collins Cobuild (p. 1035)
19 Collins Cobuild (p. 1023)
20 Collins Cobuild (p. 1717)
17
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October 2001
“... Is the system of sending pictures and sounds by electrical signs over a
distance so that people can receive them on a television in their home.”21
None of the two definitions presented above really say much about the impact
television has had on our lives. The fact that since its appearance television slowly
became present in almost every house of our occidental world, might point us
another thinking line: television is an almost omnipresent object in many, many
houses. Even when people are not paying attention to it, the device is on. Whether
we like it or not, television is responsible for many characteristics of our modern
life. For instance, David Puttnam points out, when talking about the many
problems Hollywood was facing in the early seventies, that “Television, too, had
become a dominant force, fostering an entertainment culture more immediately
responsive to current styles and values. Perhaps most significantly, a yawning gap
had opened up between the men who ran the studios and their audience”22.
Television has also become a very strong advertising media. Put it this way, apart
from having a penetration rate of almost 99,4%23, it also has its own
characteristics. For example, its “True to Life” feature, pointed out by Helen Katz.
The author explains: “The most obvious advantage of television advertising is the
opportunity to use sight, sound, color, and motion in commercials. This form of
advertising is generally considered the most lifelike, re-creating scenes and
showing people in situations with which we can all identify”24.
New Media
According to Martha Rogers and Don Peppers25, new media can be characterized
as individually addressable, two-way and inexpensive.
Internet
Internet is defined by Encyclopaedia Britannica as “a network connecting many
computer networks and based on a common addressing system and
communications protocol called TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet
Protocol)”26.
It appeared thanks to experiences made with computer networks in the sixties.
The United States Department of Defence asked its scientists to build a network of
computers that could withstand the loss of some of its units without compromising
the communications in between the remaining ones. This task was accomplished
in 1969 and the network was called ARPAnet.
21
Collins Cobuild (p. 1717)
The Undeclared War (p. 264)
23 2001 Portuguese Numbers from MARKTEST
24 The Media Book (p. 60)
25 in Cybermarketing Your Interactive Marketing Consultant (p. 10)
26 Encyclopaedia Britannica available online at http://search.britannica.com/
22
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October 2001
In its first years, Internet was, as described by Chuck Musciano & Bill Kennedy “…
Just too disorganised and, outside the government and academia, few people had
the knowledge or interest to learn how to use the arcane software or had the time
to spend rummaging through documents looking for ones of interest”27.
For years Internet access was quite restricted, making those who had access to it
a small group of privileged people, just like reading and writing skills were before
the printing invention in 1436 by Guttenberg. Table 2 gives us an idea of the
growth in host computers during the eighties.
Year
1982
1984
1984
1987
1988
1989
Number of Host Computers
235
1000
5000
28000
56000
130000
Table 2- Number of Host Computers during the eighties28
Then, in the early nineties, three crucial events enabled lnternet to quickly evolve
and to start shaping itself onto what it has become today.
The first one was the advent of high-speed modems that enabled digital
communications over ordinary phone lines. With these devices, individuals were
finally given means to enter the digital world of networks.
The second was the release of Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) by the
European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN). HTML is an authoring language
that was developed for creating and sharing electronic documents over one “part”
of the Internet, the World Wide Web (also called WWW or Web). HTML enabled
an Internet revolution, as for the first time users were able to distribute their
creations as a whole – for example multimedia documents were made possible.
Previously, to distribute such kind of work, one had to send pictures, texts and
sound separately. As such, it also enabled documents to be hyperlinked, which
meant that a “text” could finally direct a user to other existing “texts”, giving some
cyberfeatures to a forthcoming media!
Thirdly, there was only one thing missing on the technical aspect: a browser, i.e. a
piece of software that would enable the viewing of HTML documents. The first was
written by some students at the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications
(NCSA) at the University of Illinois. Mosaic – as it was called – not only could open
HTML documents but it also had built-in technology that enabled the access to
other resources of the Internet, such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP).
27
28
HTML: The Definite Guide (p. 3)
Data / Numbers source “The Glory Of The Geeks” Video Documentary
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
On top of all these revolutions / changes, individuals and businesses started to
realise the potential and power of the future “lnformation Superhighway”, and soon
they were pressuring the U.S. government to open Internet nation-wide. And in a
little while the Internet became full of neat and attractive graphics nowadays
known as CooI-Web-Pages. Quickly, as we have already seen in Table 1, Internet
expanded – and still is – to the rest of the world.
A new Mass Media?
Mostly because of its peculiar characteristics, Internet is an atypical mass media. It
has got so unusual features that one can, not only receive, but also transmit
messages to a very, very broaden potential audience.
As Gareth Branwyn points out when referring to the other existing media, “Until
recently, most of this media was “read-only,” strictly for passive consumption. An
individual or group could do little to contribute to or contradict the official big media
feed. Producing and broadcasting quality media rested in the hands of
megacorporations, governments, and individual with deep pockets”29.
The boom of personal computers and of software development capabilities
provided the Internet its major nourishment in its early stages, with thousands web
pages being built and going online everyday. Obviously not everything that was,
and still is, being produced had good quality or was even interesting, but what is
more important is that there was finally a medium where one’s individual ideas and
concepts can / could be passed on.
The same author continues, “The big bottleneck in do-it-yourself media production
has always been promotion and distribution. Now, anyone with an Internet
connection can reach a potentially huge audience at a reasonable cost. If you’ve
got something to say, modest resources, and a healthy measure of pioneering grit,
chances are you can find a media channel on which to broadcast”30. As an
example, we can look at the London’s old “pirate” radio FACE FM, later renamed
InterFACE after finding a place on the Web. Instead of broadcasting through the
airwaves for a narrow audience and having poor quality transmissions, they
started broadcasting CD audio quality to a massive potential audience. According
to Hari Kunzru, this broadcasting scheme allows the “independent record labels
with little or no international distribution to compete with the giant global media
companies”31. Gareth Branwyn says: “Many of these people may be ignorant of (or
uninterested in) the larger implications of what they’re doing, but they are part of a
communications revolution that is radically changing the way media are created,
delivered, and consumed”32. To feel a flavour of Mp3 impact and revolution, we
can go and have a look on the Mp3 Rocks The Web section33 of wired news
29
Jamming the Media (p. 12)
Jamming the Media (p. 15)
31 Pirates Invade the Web (p. 6)
32 Jamming the Media (p. 15)
33 Available online at http://www.wired.com/news/mp3
30
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
(www.wired.com), where thousands of articles on Mp3 file format and its impact on
the music industry can be found.
Another very important aspect of the Internet is its ability to create communities in
a blink of an eye. On a marketers' point of view, a community is a quite niche
market in which advertising and marketing messages can be broadcasted onto a
quite targeted audience.
Remember how dedicated magazines appeared like mushrooms a few years ago?
Online communities appear everyday or, to be more precise, every hour.
The offer range of dedicated magazines is amazing, with subjects varying from
smoking pipes to boats, not discarding mobile phones and DVDs. And all of them
are obviously stuffed with quite targeted advertising, since their readers are always
the same, those who are quite interested on the subject. Moreover, besides its
usual audience, magazines sometimes get casual readers who buy a specific
issue because they are looking for extra information on a very specific subject or
device, to make a one-off buy. Which actually means a high quality contact.
Besides, whereas the producers of dedicated magazines struggled to keep the
production prices as low as possible, replicating foreign magazine’s design,
graphical aspect and contents and only changing the text to their countries’ mother
tongue, online community’s physical (printed) manifestation of content is
meaningless, happening only on the users side – the user prints out a web page,
and that represents no extra cost for the producers. Actually it might represent a
loss since the user does it without paying for the content.
But all this happens on a virtual environment where a very targeted group of
people can be found at a very decent price, not to say a bargain – put it this way,
like web portals (Yahoo, MSN, etc.) did. You create a web space in which not only
you empower the users to create their own communities, but you can also come
up with some, by providing a starting content. It sure is a big investment, but once
it is done, no matter how many communities you host, your biggest investment has
already been made. Moreover, you can start selling targeted advertising either
explicit (e. g. banners) or covered (as sponsorship).
Now, imagine how interest wide can these kind of online communities be.
Especially because they are augmented in two ways: people get together in a
(supposed) moderator-free environment and, on top, its potential reach for a given
interest is that of a worldwide audience. What this means is that it gets easier to
deliver the right advertising messages to the right people, regardless of where they
are. Something that was hardly achievable in the past.
As one example of those thousands of online communities, I would point the EGroups (www.egroups.com). E-Groups was nothing more than a web site that
provided all the back-end software solutions, so that the users could easily start
interest groups on a web environment. Quickly they were supporting thousands of
different interest groups, and selling quite target advertising. This targeting was
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
achieved because, during each new group registration, some questions regarding
the interest or the scope of the group were asked. Then, it was obviously just a
question of attracting potential advertisers, clever! The site and company were
later acquired by the web portal Yahoo (www.yahoo.com). Wonder why the
biggest online advertising domain got this service!
Going back to music as another practical example of a very niche community,
emphasised by the strong investment done today foreseeing the future, I would
point the efforts made by Spinrecords (www.spinrecords.com) whose idea was to
start streaming independent music from its site, allowing student radios in the U.S.
to use their indie streams for free. For the time being, the idea is to create an
online musical indie community, as Brad King states, “With help from
spinrecords.com, college radio stations may find it easier to maintain a consistent
programming format, allowing users to settle into a regular listening pattern and
interact with like-minded rockers from other schools”34. But ultimately what
Spinrecords is looking for, according to the same author, is the moment when
those students will leave school and start working – i.e. the moment when they will
have money! But, most of all, they will know the bands and the albums in which
they want to spend their earnings.
More developments on Internet will come later in the text. This short and brief
analysis enables us to realise the kind of potential in media strategy and allocation
(placement) Internet provided as a media, shifting to a more general approach on
one hand, and to the building of a relationship, on the other.
Interactive Television
It appears important at this point to bring forward a working definition of Interactive
Television, since we have already presented working definitions for Old Media,
Television, New Media and Internet. Obviously this is not going to be a very indepth analysis as it will appear later in this report.
To begin with, it is important to state that Interactive Television is not just the
bringing of interactive features to television; it is far more than that. It is much more
about transforming television’s linear concept onto a non-linear one, and that
should include narratives as well. Clearly that change will not happen from one
day to another. Many problems – from which I would point technical and social
adaptation – have to be resolved before. It is vital that, from this point on, one
bears in mind that having a bigger remote control with loads of buttons to control a
television might not be synonym of interactive television, even if (when) the
industry considers it so. It might only worth another less presumptuous title, like
enhanced or augmented television.
34
Net Lessons for Labels at Indies (p. 1)
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
Since it is imperative to define Interactive Television to move on with our analyses,
here follows a working definition. On the site Itvnews (www.itvnews.com),
Interactive Television is defined as “the meeting of television with new interactive
technology. ITV is domestic television with interactive facilities usually facilitated
through a ‘back channel’ and / or an advanced terminal. Equally important,
interactive television is content that users and viewers can interact with via the
technical system. Interactive television is also a way of empowering viewers to use
television in new ways”35.
As we can see, it mentions technology, domestic television, content that people
can interact with. It also points an important change: television will be “used”
opposing to “watched”. But what is more important is that it leaves open the most
crucial part of the whole concept: How is it going to be used? In what “new ways”
will people be empowered?
The answers to these questions seem to rely on two factors. The first is what can
a starving-for-money industry come up with to engage the consumers. The second
and most important is what will the users / consumers feel the need to / for.
Related to this subject, I would like to bring your attention briefly to a recent
BBCnews article “Turning on to Interaction”. It focuses on a very interesting fact –
the booming and later fading of many dot.com’s companies and the way the
producers of ITV learned various lessons of it. The article argues that the web
portals started to offer loads of services “… that dot.coms thought visitors needed.
But it became obvious that people preferred to go to sites they already knew, had
found themselves, or had been told about by friends. People didn’t like being told
what to do”36, and that nowadays, “broadcasters are adapting iTV to what
consumers are doing with it rather than forcing them into a narrow range of
choices”37. Focusing on the hardware part of the setop box, the article pointed that
this technological adaptation must be scalable.
Nevertheless, on content level, there will be also an ongoing evolution process, as
Leos de Vos argues: “When lTV developers would be aware of the contexts of the
use of their ITV programmes and services they would develop more insight in the
potential interactivity in interactive television settings and this would contribute to
the success of their ITV programmes and services”38. We will obviously come back
to these matters later in the text.
As a summary for ITV, I would say, for the moment, that the developments in
Interactive Television will have to respect the users’ tempo, and not present at
once all the interactive possibilities, since many of these will be needs and
requests, which will be appearing as a result of the change on the viewing side to
the user capability of the device.
35
Available online at: www.itvnews.com/whatis/index.com
Turning on to Interaction (p. 2)
37 Ibid.
38 Searching for the Holy Grail, Images of Interactive television (p. 1)
36
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
Conclusion
In this part, we started with a brief overview of advertising history and the factors
that have conducted its evolution to the industry such as we know it. We presented
also the players directly involved on the advertising industry and the stages an
advertising campaign undertakes inside an advertising agency. Moreover, we
stated the need the consumers might have towards advertising.
Following the considerations on adverting, we moved towards an analysis on the
communication means, otherwise known as mass media. We contextualised the
term mass media and stated the importance technology improvements have had
in the evolution of the concept, especially in the last century. Then and since this
work is centred on Interactive Television, we set to provide a working definition of
it. We did this by starting analysing two existing media: first, television and its
social impact over the time of its existence, and second, Internet and its particular
technology features. The reason behind this is that Interactive Television appears
to relate in many aspects to the media of Television and Internet. Under Interactive
Television definition, we finished stressing out the importance time will have on its
further developments.
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
Part II
31
European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
Introduction
In this part and after a brief overview on the advertising process and the mass
communication means (mass media), it appears appropriate to develop some
ideas on communication. The thought behind having two distinct parts – one that
relates to advertising and mass media (Part 1) and this second that relates to
communication – is to set some background, so that later we can analyse the
relationship between both, as it is on the relationship of both that this work stands
and pretends to draw some ideas / conclusions.
However and before moving further on this second part, I would like to point one
aspect. There is a close relationship between new technologies and the way
humans use them. That relationship assumes various forms. To begin with,
sometimes humans do not make any use of the new technologies. In other cases,
people find the “appropriate” use for those technologies – i.e. the use given to
them is the same they were intended for. Finally, people can get to some form of
over or mislead use of technology, in which the purpose the technology was
designed or developed for diverts, changing to something new.
Take the remote control as an example, bearing in mind the clash of opinions
related to the act of watching television. For many people, watching television is
nothing more than a passive act, as Phillip Swann states: “Some social critics…
…say the TV viewer is nothing more than a Couch Potato - a lazy, passive blob
who has no interest in interacting with the screen”39. The author contests this point
of view, stating that the passive approach a viewer had towards the act of
watching television has changed over time, mostly due to technological
developments, which resulted on new “in front of the screen” behaviours: “Well,
that may have been true twenty years ago when you could only watch three or four
channels - and you had to get up from your couch or easy chair to turn the
channel. But cable TV and the remote control changed all that”40. The same author
points to something that, in my opinion, is a over or misuse of the remote control:
”Many viewers, particularly males, now interact with their screens about every ten
seconds, flipping from one channel to the next. The “Couch Potato” has been
replaced by “Short Attention Span Man” (most women seem immune to this
affliction)”41. I think this last use of the remote control is not the most appropriate
since, in terms of content, one catches disconnected fragments of broadcasted
information, although, ironically, maybe the content available through the television
airwaves is not worth more then 10s of our attention.
Rap music also appeared this way: turntables were not developed so that one
could scratch the vinyl at his will. But because someone started doing it, a new
music movement emerged. Nevertheless, it is a misuse of technology in the sense
Gareth Branwyn uses, when talking about personal media and the diversity of
TV dot Com –The future of Interactive Television (pp. 38-39)
TV dot Com –The future of Interactive Television (p. 39)
41 TV dot Com –The future of Interactive Television (p. 39)
39
40
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
uses we give it: “The early developers of desktop publishing and the original
architects of the Internet would undoubtedly be shocked by today’s personal
media technologies and the wild diversity of their uses. And what would the
developers of the record turntable make of an art form like rap that builds its sound
(and an entire musical subculture) around the apparent misuse of the device?”42.
It is a bit like what is pointed by Umberto Eco in his book “Viagem na Irrealidade
Quotidiana”. The author directs us to the idea of the remote control as a messagecomposing device and, as such, he argues the death of the mass media. The
author then proceeds to other very interesting thinking paths, but if we stop right
here, we could picture the death of mass media giving birth to another type of
media that we can call self made media or D.I.Y. Media.
On a deeper level as we have already seen in part 1, Internet appears to be one of
its primary starting devices, obviously supported by the boom of Personal
Computers. But following the same thinking path, Interactive Television can
materialise onto a strong contender for the future, which actually brings us directly
to another thinking path, again related to technology but regarding the way new
technology and the new means of communication, new media, threaten the
patterns on which the studies of communication are solidly rooted.
For example, the Internet as a mean of mass communication is in itself a
paradigm: if, on one hand, we can have a mass communication model like that of
television which delivers information from one-to-many, we can also have
examples of one-to-one, many-to-one and many-to-many communication using
the same media.
As Jayne Gackenbach points out “The Internet has created new configurations of
the classic aspects of communication; sources, messages, and receivers, which
are requiring researchers to examine old definitions”43. The author goes deeper in
this analysis, pointing that “Internet communications are essentially either
synchronous, occur simultaneously in real time, or asynchronous, where there is a
delay in real time. When you add to this the classic dimension from communication
researchers of the sender, who puts out the message, and receiver, who receives
the message, and the range of people who can engage in these two functions,
one, few, or many, you are left with an 18-cell matrix of potential Internet
communications. This does not, however, take into account the variations in types
of messages available, but it begins to at least frame the potential complexities of
this new media”44.
Even though this author refers to Internet and not to Television, we can easily see
that bringing interactivity capabilities to a television set (Interactive Television) will
somehow drag some of the characteristics above pointed to a new argument. The
same author concludes, “… it is clear that the potential combinations of
communication via the Internet are many and not easily reduced to the previously
42
Jamming the Media (p. 21)
Psychology and the Internet (p. 18)
44 Psychology and the Internet (p. 18)
43
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studied mediated communication, which was one way, or to simple versions of
face-to-face communication”45. We will develop this under users’ content.
Moreover, the technology behind Internet and ITV supports real-time feedback,
something that was not really available in the old mass media. What I mean is that
one could write a letter with comments and suggestions to improve a TV
programme, assuming that the TV station had a good P.R. department – i.e. that
any letter with comments and/or suggestions has a fair chance of being read. The
whole process of receiving and reading the letter, and deciding whether to accept
or not one suggestion or to take measures to correct a critique would take at least
one week. The same would happen with any other mass media.
Another example could be that the “activity” provided by the existing mass media
was based, until very recently, on an on / off of the communicating process. Even
the action of changing channels appears to be included in this area, since one is
only deciding upon which source to choose on a information flow at one given
moment. It’s just like reading a book: one can argue that the reading of a book or a
newspaper can be made at random. It is true, but it seems to have no interactivity,
though it is a very good example for randomness, a feature that is often appended
to the concept of interactivity. What is evident is that there is no change in the
content presented by the book or newspaper due to our back and forth reading.
And that change of content can and should be seen as inherent to a, let’s say,
“proper” interactive communication process, as we will see further on this part of
the work.
There are several models of communication, whose study is not only very
interesting but also a quite engaging task. Although I do not pretend to be
exhaustive (even if I wanted, you and me would quickly understand that I do not
have enough background to undertake that job), it is important for the argument to
present some considerations regarding communication and communication
models, even in a very superficial and brief analysis.
The fields of semiotics and semantics will not be too much emphasized, not that I
am careless about the importance both have in the developing of a communication
act – far from that. Actually, these two fields of the communication process,
together with some scepticism towards the interfaces that Interactive Television
might adopt, have been largely discussed relating to the involvement the viewer /
user of Interactive Television might have in the “shape”46 of an (interactive)
message and also in the device itself.
On another level, and to help framing this analysis to the models of communication
and then applying them to the mass media and to interactive television advertising,
I will start by providing a working definition of interactivity, mostly because, in my
opinion, it is through real interactivity that advertising has its scoop in Interactive
Television. As a strictly technical example, I would suggest you to have a look at
45
46
Psychology and the Internet (p. 18)
See Gerbner’s Communication Model
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the multimedia section on the “el Pais” newspaper web site47. Obviously this is not
an example for ITV interactivity, but it is for Internet. The point is this: as a
newspaper, “el Pais” has all the texts of the printed version available online, but as
a complement it also has some of its news stories illustrated on a multimedia
way48. It is this kind of developments on the way features are presented that
appears crucial to be developed in order to augment the users’ experience. It is
not about bringing interactivity to Television only but, instead, to make Interactive
Television content. We have covered this idea in part one, under Interactive
Television concept.
Also very important is the concept of pacing that can be directly applied to any
form of communication, as we will see after the notion of interactivity. Mixed and
internal pacing seems to play a key role in the future of the relationship between
the consumer and the businesses (companies).
Interactivity
Interactivity is not an easy describable feature. The word results of the
combination between the word inter and the verb to act. The word inter is used
combined with “…adjectives and nouns to form adjectives indicating that
something moves, exists, or happens between two or more places, things, or
groups of people”49. The verb act means “… to do something for a particular
purpose”50. So one interacts with someone (or something) from whom one can
expect a reaction, even if that reaction does not add anything new to one’s
previous act. Obviously, the more someone (something) reacts, the more
interactive the relation gets.
Apparently, many definitions of interactivity focus too much on a particular media
rather then on the concept itself. Nevertheless, Collins Cobuild gives us two more
notions that we should bear in mind as well: “If you describe a group of people or
their activities as interactive, you mean that the people communicate with each
other”51; and also “An interactive computer program or television system is one
which allows direct communication between the user and the machine”52
Leos de Vos and Van Djik’s study on interactive television puts forward three
criteria considered relevant for the application of the concept to television: 1)
Human-Human Interaction; 2) Human-Medium-Human Interaction; and 3) HumanMedium Interaction.
47
El Pais web site available at: http://www.elpais.es/multimedia.html
Done with Macromedia Flash
49 Collins Cobuild (p. 879)
50 Collins Cobuild (p. 18)
51 Collins Cobuild (p. 879)
52 Collins Cobuild (p. 879)
48
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On a quick look, since these criteria appear to be appropriate for the interactions
enabled by Interactive Television, it is under their work that we are going to
develop our analyses.
The concept of interactivity
Later in their work, these authors propose that interactivity should be broken on to
four different dimensions:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Spatial Dimension, relating to the “Multi-Lateralness”: “A primary definition
of interactive media is activity in two or more directions. At least two actors
and two actions are involved: a supplier or sender transmits signals and a
user or receiver returns signals in this way becoming a sender himself or
herself. The number of turns varies and depends upon the number of
choices the user can make (for lTV this can be: programmes, additional
information, camera angles etc.)”53.
Time Dimension, relating to “Synchronicity and space of time”: “AII social
and communication scientists agree that the immediate succession of
action and reaction reinforces interactivity. Asynchronous communication
like in using answering devices or e-mail easily leads to a rupture of
interaction, a lesser grip on it or misunderstandings”54.
Behavioural Dimension, relating to “Controlling the Action”: “The extent of
control of the (inter)action process by people is the most important
dimension of interactivity in communication science… The importance of
the dimension of control in communication science can be explained by the
central role of media characteristics in this discipline. However, control of
action is just as well a characteristic of face-to-face communication”55.
Mental Dimension, relating to “Understanding Action”: “The level of
understanding interactors are able to derive from actions and to locate
against a background of experiences and circumstances (context) is the
most important difference between face-to-face and mediated
communication (Suchman, 1987)”56.
Now that we framed interactivity onto a media context, it is appropriate to bring
forward the concept of pacing, as it is of greater importance to the future of the
media in general!
53
Searching for the Holy Grail, Images of Interactive television (p. 39)
Searching for the Holy Grail, Images of Interactive television (p. 40)
55 Searching for the Holy Grail, Images of Interactive television (p. 40)
56 Searching for the Holy Grail, Images of Interactive television (p. 40)
54
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The concept of pacing
Pacing can be described as “…the control one can have over the media”57.
Obviously it is a matter of great importance when talking about the media and its
use to broadcast commercial messages.
There are basically three pacing categories: 1) pacing can be made by the sender
– “External Pacing”; 2) it can be made by the receiver – “Internal Pacing”; 3) and it
can be made by both – “Mixed Pacing”.
It is considered that a television broadcast is external pacing and that a newspaper
is internal pacing enabled. Internet and other interactive media are considered to
be mixed and internal pacing, depending on the specific situation. Obviously
Interactive Television will fall under these two categories, giving an old media
characteristics of new media, amongst which internal pacing appears to become
the dominant one.
Communication
What is Communication
According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, communication is “the exchange of
meanings between individuals through a common system of symbol…"58. Or, in
other words, communication is basically the exchange of information between at
least two points or persons.
And Encyclopaedia Britannica adds: “…Explicit definitions and theories of
communication were not proposed until 20th-century…”59. It is about such theories
that we are going to centre our attentions in the following paragraphs.
Moreover, Encyclopaedia Britannica states, “advances in science and technology
gave rise to the mass-communications media”60. And as we have seen in the
history of advertising, one of the key factors for the population reach it has
nowadays were developments in the communication means, enabling a more
personal communication to be broaden and done for the masses. These features
obviously came out of technology developments, such as the printed industry
(newspapers), radio and television.
57
O Marketing Personalizado e as Tecnologias de Informação (p. 73)
Encyclopaedia Britannica available online at http://search.britannica.com/
59 Encyclopaedia Britannica available online at http://search.britannica.com/
60 Encyclopaedia Britannica available online at http://search.britannica.com/
58
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Communication Feed
Communication Feed relates to the direction of an information flow (e. g. a
message). One of the biggest criticisms around the studies on communication
models is that many believe that communication is an endless process. Being
endless, it cannot be totally represented in a linear way, mostly because a
communication process implies that there is a change of the direction to which the
feed is heading. For that reason, I decided to split my analyses into two different
sections: the linear models and the non-linear models.
Models of Communication
Linear models
It was upon linearity that the first communication studies were developed. In fact,
linearity is, in a sense, the basis of all communication, as we will see, even though
linear models may not be the most effective way to represent a communication
process. On its basis, there are some kind of linear events inherent to a
communication process.
The Shannon and Weaver Model
According to John Fiske, it is largely accepted that the first studies on
communication processes were published in 1949 under the name of “The
Mathematical Theory of Communication”61 and “Recent Contributions to the
Mathematical Theory of Communication”. These studies were initiated by Claude
Shannon, a collaborator for Bell Telephonical Labs during the II World War. Later
Shannon work has seen some addictions by Warren Weaver, as Robert S.
Tannenbaum points: “Weaver adapted Shannon’s “Mathematical Theory of
Communication” (which originally applied only to electronic communication) to
the process of human communication”62. In the beginning, Shannon came up with
what he called a General Communication System. Fig. 1 shows us the original
model as designed by its author.
61
62
Available online at http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannoday/shannon1948.pdf
Theoretical Foundations of Multimedia (p. 254)
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October 2001
Fig. 1- Shannon’s original General Communication System (1947)63
It is important to state that the author’s aim was to produce a system – later, with
the work of W. Weaver, it started to be referred to as a model - that would enable
to reproduce any given message. For Shannon, engineer working for Bell, it was in
the system that resided the communication problems. As stated on the opening
page of his report, “The fundamental problem of communication is that of
reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at
another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are
correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities.
These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering
problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a
set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each
possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is
unknown at the time of design”64.
Although the system itself is quite self-comprehensive, here follows the author’s
brief explanation:
“1. An information source which produces a message or sequence of messages
to be communicated to the receiving terminal.
2. A transmitter which operates on the message in some way to produce a signal
suitable for transmission over the channel.
3. The channel is merely the medium used to transmit the signal from transmitter
to receiver.
4. The receiver ordinarily performs the inverse operation of that done by the
transmitter, reconstructing the message from the signal.
5. The destination is the person (or thing) for whom the message is intended.”65
63
A Mathematical Theory of Communication (p. 2)
A Mathematical Theory of Communication (p. 1)
65 A Mathematical Theory of Communication (p. 2)
64
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We should bear in mind that there is no mention to the message itself in
Shannon’s description of the system, though there is a starting and a finishing
point, as in any system. Later, Weaver’s addictions moved Shannon’s exertion to a
less technology-oriented work and produced a model (Fig. 2) in which we can find
some influence of Lasswell formula (Fig. 3). The model became known as
Shannon and Weaver’s model.
Fig. 2 –The Shannon and Weaver Model (1949)66
Here we have the main components perfectly identified. There is a source
(Information Source in the original paper), an encoder (Transmitter in the original
paper), a message (Not referred in the original paper), a channel, noise (Noise
source in the original paper) that can be physical or semantic noise, a decoder
(receiver in the original paper) and a receiver (Destination in the original paper).
One to mass (Media Oriented models)
The Lasswell Formula
According to Mick Underwood, Harold Lasswell was a sociologist and, therefore,
he “…was primarily concerned with mass communication and propaganda…”67. A
subsequent analyses on John Fiske’s readings shows us the Lasswell formula
(Fig. 3) raising the question “With What Effect?”, opposing to Shannon and
Weaver’s “Meaning of the Message”.
Fig. 3 –The Lasswell Formula (1948)68
66
(Modified) Figure taken from Mick Underwood InfoBase available online
Mick Underwood InfoBase Available online
68 (Modified) Figure taken from Mick Underwood InfoBase available online
67
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For Lasswell, every message has a final effect on the receiver (let us not forget
that Lasswell was a sociologist). The final effect appears as a consequence of
several elements that are present during the communication process. So it is
important to know who is the communicator (Transmitter, Source) and to which
influences is he subject (does he operate), since those will be the first bias force in
the process – raising the issue of control research. On the other hand, it is
pertinent to question how a particular message is represented in terms of content
– content research. As to Channel (nowadays usually referred to as medium), it is
important to enquire how appropriate it can be to the transmission of a particular
message – channel (medium) research. The receiver (known as Audience in
mass-media vocabulary) is also of very high importance, since the success of
good communication comes in part from knowing your audience – Audience
Research. Last but not least, effect, as Mick Underwood says: “We don’t
communicate in a vacuum. We normally communicate because we want to
achieve something” – an effect, I dare adding. This is known as effects research.
Obviously, these last two are crucial in communication processes, especially those
of advertising!
Gerbner Model
Gerbner model (1956), as Lasswell formula, denotes a major concern on the
semantic part of the communication process. John Fiske, in his book “Introdução
ao Estudo da Comunicação”69, points that the Gerbner model (Fig. 4) adds two
dimensions to Shannon and Weaver’s model, though maintaining its linear
approach to the act of communicating.
Fig. 4 –The Gerbner Model (1956)70
69
70
Original Title “Introduction to Communication Studies”
(Modified) Figure taken from Mick Underwood InfoBase available online
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
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The first dimension, horizontal, has to do with the “relationship between the
message and the reality”. This dimension enables us to consider perception and
significance as part of the message, which is obviously different for each
individual.
As we can see in Mick Underwood’s figure, this perceptual dimension has to do
with the relationship between the communicating agent and a world of events. This
means that there are three variables upon which this perceptual dimension is
created: 1) Selection that relates to the part of “E” that “M” selects or, on other
words, the part of “E” that “M” is more influenced by; 2) Context under which “E”
takes place; and 3) Availability that relates to the number of “E's" taking place –
the less occurrences the more attention is given to each “E”.
Moreover, this dimension allows two shifting roles: the perceptive, which occurs in
“M1” and relates to “E”; and the receptive, which occurs in “M2” and relates to
“SE”.
The second dimension, vertical, defined by Mick Underwood as a “Means and
Control Dimension”71 deals with the contents of a message and its “shape” (how it
is presented), though these two are not treated individually and, in fact, work has a
variable whole. John Fiske states that it is down to the communicator to choose
the best / appropriate relationship between them. I would point that it is under this
dimension that the ability one has to operate the media is determinant, not only to
choose the best media for a given message but also to make the best use of that
same media regarding a given message. Obviously, the resulting shape is almost
as personal as the perception of an event can be. This model also appears to suit
all right to represent a one-to-one (Interpersonal) Communication.
Non-Linear Models
As referred earlier, many people defend that to look and to represent
communication as a linear process was not the most appropriate way. It is not my
intention to argue about the different opinions regarding communication and
communication processes. Regardless of how the process of communication is
represented, new media communication has to be characterised not only as an
endless process but also as a process that is most likely to happen in real-time.
One to one (Interpersonal Oriented)
Osgood & Schramm Circular Model
Osgood & Schramm considered communication to be and endless process, so
their model (Fig. 5) tries to overcome linearity by resuming communication to a
71
Mick Underwood InfoBase Available online
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October 2001
circular process. This circular feature also applies to its members “who swap
between the rôles of source/encoder and receiver/decoder”72.
Fig. 5 –The Osgood & Schramm Circular model (1954)73
Here we can easily see that, apart the constant role changing, every time a
message is received there is an interpretation process. This interpretation process
combines three different stages: the decoding, the interpretation itself and a new
encoding. This kind of model is more interpersonal and real-time feedback
oriented than the previous analysed models. We could apply this model
straightforwardly to a one-to-one communication, although it lacks, in its
representation, the noise, either semantic or physical. It is important to state the
magnitude semantic noise can have on any form of communication, especially in
that of interpersonal communication.
This model can also be easily applied to Internet communication, although it lacks
a representation of the shape74 of the message, which, in a sense and on an
Internet environment, sums up the relationship the intervenients might have with
the medium, when acting both as sender or as receiver. On Internet, this shape is
open to a plurality of various shapes, since many different media can be combined
in just one message, according to Jayne Gackenbach’s quote brought forward
earlier in the beginning of this part.
Applying the communication models to advertising
Now that we have seen and analysed basic communication models, it is time to
apply them to advertising.
72
Mick Underwood InfoBase Available online
(Modified) Figure taken from Mick Underwood InfoBase available online
74 See Gerbner’s Communication Model
73
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Traditional Advertising
By traditional advertising we refer to advertising done in all the non new-media –
i.e. newspapers, magazines, radio, television, billboards and so on, as we have
already seen. Compared to new media advertising, traditional media advertising
have common drawbacks in terms of measuring their efficiency.
Also another characteristic of traditional media advertising could be that the socalled mass media are only capable of an interfering approach to the audience –
the commercial message appears without being asked, interfering with what one is
trying to absorb. Michael Schrage, in “Is Advertising Dead?”, refers to this
approach as “intrusive” and Seth Godin, in “Permission Marketing”, refers to it as
“interruptive”. For both amongst many others, there is no room for this approach in
the future of the mass media, as we will try to prove. Put it in other terms,
traditional advertising is based on a push technology content distribution, in which
the user receives content without being asked if he or she wants to receive it.
Moreover, the commercial messages invade users’ space giving them very little
chance to reply, which is also something that is set to be changed with the new
media!
The Shannon and Weaver model
From what we could see in its description, the Shannon and Weaver model could
be easily applied to people watching TV. Nevertheless, and even knowing that the
model was designed to maximise the capabilities of communication over a
telephone line, the model is far from being outdated. Moreover, it applies
individually to any of the parties taking an active part in any form of
communication. John Fiske’s analysis provides enough background to a couple of
ideas I would like to point out.
The author makes a clear distinction between Redundancy and Entropy, stating
that the first refers to what is predictable and conventional in a message, and that
the second – entropy – is the exact opposite. Fiske suggests that the more popular
a message is, the more redundancy traces it gets. With these notions as
background, he points out that the broadness (Amount / Number) of receivers is
enlarged and communication is more effective when a popular message is sent or
displayed, and, on the contrary, that a highly entropic image can only be perceived
by very few (as we can see on the advertising done in specialized magazines such
as computer magazines, bicycle magazines, and so on!).
If such is applicable, then I would go a little further and continue his analyses by
pointing the fact that mass media advertising – e.g. Television – is mostly based
on the broadcasting of redundant messages. A mass media like television can
deliver commercial messages throughout several different channels, such as
audition, viewing, reading and so on. The main idea behind this thought is: we all
know what is expectable or predictable of (to be on) an advert, right? We all know
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
that the actors are going to be the most beautiful people the casting crew
managed to come up with, the physical space where the action takes place, or the
place where people (actors) live, is always perfect, maybe a dream house for
many of us. Above all, the story that is told - when the advert has a story line always ends up well! It’s obvious, the purpose of an advert is to sell, and if it
weren’t for these images “texts”, all together working as a whole, the purpose
would not be completely achieved. That is why a coming together of redundant
factors – such as images, sounds, clothes, etc… - is so widely used. This
combination makes the viewers’ brain bypass about 90% of the advert and leads
them to the end of the advert, ready to retrieve just the final and important
message, “buy our product!” Or if you prefer, ”…In a thirty seconds advert the
companies use twenty seconds of imagery and rock and roll leaving ten seconds
or less to talk about its product…”75.
Obviously this formula can be applied to television quite well, since the audience is
by definition very large and broaden. This strategic communication approach can
maximise the effects on the masses that very little and expensive seconds of TV
airtime cost! Though it is far from being personal, when applied to mass
communications. We must not forget that the idea behind Shannon’s studies was
not only to optimise but also to measure the amount of information a medium
could deliver. Maybe one can say that at this moment television channels are
overcharged with advertising and that television as a medium is itself overcharged
as well.
Harold Lasswell Formula
It is obvious that Lasswell work relates more to mass communication processes
than Shannon and Weaver model. As such, it is expected that it take the mass
communication process a bit further. After a brief analysis like the one done
before, we get the idea that the model is quite comprehensive and that, obviously,
the authors’ concerns regarding the effects communication has on the audience
stands out. I do not think Lasswell's main concern was towards the effects of mass
media advertising, instead it must have been mainly focused on political matters
and obviously on propaganda as a key issue. Nevertheless, finding the right target
and the appropriate channel is crucial for advertising, and Lasswell pointed it
regarding to communication. Looking at television as an advertising vehicle, we
can see that it lacks seriously of good targeting capabilities.
In terms of effect, if we analyse the model under the advertising motto “… telling
people about products, events, or job vacancies, and making them want to buy the
products, go to the events, or apply for the jobs”76, the wanted effect behind the
broadcasting of advertising messages is evident: the main effect is “buy our
products”! But we know that nowadays advertising is not just about buying and
selling, it has evolved a lot beyond that point. Nowadays, advertising messages
75
76
Mathieson 1999 in O Marketing Personalizado e as Tecnologias de Informação (p. 77)
Collins Cobuild (p. 27)
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
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are broadcasted with several different purposes – ranging from brand-awareness
to cooperative image – and Lasswell's formula just appears to fit perfectly to these
new cause / effect communication purposes. Especially if we are constrained to a
one-way communication media category in which “old” television appears to fall.
Though on a two-way media, Lasswell formula had to be endlessly reproduced
both ways in order to embrace viewers’ feedback.
Gerbner Model
Gerbner considerations on the shape of a message are very important in television
communication, and acquire an extra importance when we think of a medium like
Internet, in which a multitude of individual media can be used on its own or
combined. We will see further, when discussing the way Internet advertising is
being done, how different shapes have different results in terms of user impact
and interaction.
Osgood & Schramm Circular Model
In terms of Internet communication, it is easy to see how this model can be used
to describe a user / company relationship, as it becomes over time an ongoing
process. In terms of television advertising, this model does not seems to be the
most appropriate (one can always write a letter to the producers, but how long
would it take to get some kind of feed-back on the screen?)
Television advertising
One can say that advertising has evolved a lot during the past few years,
especially television advertising. New ways of exploring both the traditional media
and also the laws frontiers were developed.
When it comes to television advertising, new terms describing new approaches to
the medium appeared – bartering, product placement, and sponsorship are just
ways to make advertising messages get through the consumer.
But even before these approaches emerged in our daily advertising, other
changes regarding mainly the physical shape of the television adverts occurred.
For example, adverts have seen its duration time being reduced since the sixties.
This has mostly to do with two factors. First, a firm called Yankelovich did some
research in the sixties and found out that the effectiveness of an advert did not
stepped out upon the doubling of the adverts’ duration. Also the prices of television
advertising started rising at the same time, as Helen Katz points: “For many years,
the standard television spot lasted a full minute. Then, in the mid-1960s more and
more advertisers started using 30-second commercials, finding them more costefficient and no less effective. As costs continued to increase during the 1970s
and early 1980s, advertisers tried the same tactic, shifting to even smaller
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
commercial lengths. Today, the 15-second spot accounts for 38 percent of all
network TV commercials”77. Moreover, the channel became saturated and, at the
moment, the advertiser does not have in average, according to Doc Comparato 78,
more than 7 sec. to capture the viewers’ eyeballs. After that time, if the viewer was
not won, the advert becomes a useless advert to which the viewer pays no
attention. And advertising is meant to have the viewers looking at the screen,
interested on what they are seeing. This helps to explain how difficult it is
nowadays to make television advertising. Moreover, it explains how the use of
redundant imagery and sound with its strong catching attributes has become the
norm to grab viewers’ attention.
As a result of new technology and marketing strategy developments, new media
combinations “media-mix” emerged. A good example for this can be the MultiMedia campaigns. The term “Multi-media campaign” is used to refer to the use of
more than one medium to spread an advertising message.
In the summer of 2000, when Interactive Television started buzzing, there were
two campaigns using crossed media in Portugal. They combined Television and
Internet to create brand-awareness. One was for a soft drink and the other was for
an Internet portal / directory. The concept for both was the same, but obviously the
films were quite different. After watching on “telly” the first part of the advert, one
was stimulated to go to the advertisers’ web site and watch 3 possible endings.
From those the viewer could choose and vote on one of them. Soon on television
the most voted ending was added to the commercial and a voiceover would say
something like: “This was the choice of Portuguese web users”.
I was fortuned enough to be a member of the working group in one of them (Fig. 6)
and I remember to have delivered a small in-house presentation on Interactive
television at that time, using “our” set of films as an example.
77
78
The Media Book (pp 63-64)
Da Criação ao Guião – A Arte de Escrever para Cinema e Televisão (p. 44)
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
Fig. 6 – ScreenShots of Trinaranjus Capuchinho 30”+ 5” + 5” + 5” – Produced by Publicis Portugal (2000)
My colleague’s reaction in that room was a mixture of happiness for having the
proposed campaign goals achieved, but also of disillusion because everyone
realised the extra-impact the advert might have had if the medium used
(Television) was interactivity / feedback enabled. This extra-impact would be
called Real-Time based and we mentioned its importance a while ago when we
covered interactivity. It could have been much more rewarding for the consumer to
vote upon 3 full-screen video choices and check the results "on the fly". Maybe
next time!
Another advertising practice is that of product placement that, as the name
suggests, is nothing more than intentionally showing products on the screen.
According to Doc Comparato’s79 book Da Criação ao Guião - A Arte de Escrever
para Cinema e Televisão, product placement can be divided under two different
79
Da Criação ao Guião – A Arte de Escrever para Cinema e Televisão (p. 40)
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
categories: 1) the product placement in which the products are placed on the set,
and simply appear on screen with more or less detail; and 2) a situation meaning
much more added value for the advertiser, in which the product becomes part of
the action and can, not only be mentioned, but also be shown contributing to one
actors’ performance. In this second category, we quickly realise the power of this
advertising feature – e. g. 007 and the use of BMW cars in the latest films, Apple
Laptop Computers in “Mission Impossible” and so many more. More recently in
Portuguese television, Big Brother’s Reality Show is reported to have helped one
furniture make to sell out, which should not surprise anyone: after all Big Brother is
reported to have done wonders for audience share increases of Televisão
Independente (TVI)80 in 2000, and continues to do so – the newspaper Expresso
reports for October 2001 72.4% of audience share to Big Brother81.
Another approach to advertising (sometimes not so different of product placement)
is that of Bartering. A company or a group of companies (advertiser) agrees with a
Television station to provide a programme or a series of programmes on a given
subject at their own expense. For the TV Station, it is wonderful: they get free
contents and, moreover, they can sell advertising during the breaks. So you might
be wondering where is the advertisers pay-off. The pay-off is that with the
programme the company can create awareness to special products or areas – e.
g. new technologies in general or automobile industry. In different words, it is all
about time with the viewer, rather than trying to make explicit sales. Curiosity and
brand-awareness can be generated like this.
Content sponsorship is all about having a sponsor related to one specific part of
the programme. Quite used in live sport broadcasting, it uses one brand name
associated to a specific sport. Something like “today’s football broadcast is brought
to you by [whatever sports brand you can think of]”.
Old Advertising
To sum up in terms of the broadcasting of marketing messages over the traditional
media, I think Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak model of “one-to-many
marketing communication for mass media” (Fig. 7) says it all. Their model (Fig. 7)
relates to the possible relations that could be established regardless the shape of
the advertising message. We can see that the model finds its roots on the linear
approach to communication.
80
81
TVI Portuguese television station also know as “4”
Marktest figures in “De Baixo Para Cima” (p. 70)
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
Fig. 7 –Traditional One-To-Many Marketing Communication for Mass Media (1995)82
The letter “F” relates to a company or firm that puts out a message (content)
throughout a medium that will reach the consumers “C”. It is by all means a push
approach to advertising for the only possible developing relationship is that of a
passiveness towards what is being seen, heard or read. There is no possible
feedback using the same channel. Moreover the possible feedback (e. g. a letter)
is never going to be in real time.
Television Media Placement & Strategy
Media Placement / Strategy / Buying is based more upon hints than upon concrete
elements. Obviously, the so-called traditional media made fair efforts to appeal to
as many particular audiences as possible – e.g. the already spoken huge amount
of specialised magazines and their offering on quite precise target groups, or the
various types of television programmes, amongst others.
Nevertheless, that does not make media strategy and effectiveness exact, or so
exact as the new media can be, as we will see. No matter how exact media
strategy is, it will never be as exact as the people in the business wanted it. Surely
demographics and population classes can be a precious help, but they are not
exact. They are based on likeliness and not in real facts such as the likes and
dislikes of someone in particular. The targeting is obviously done for the mass,
disregarding the individual habits or likes, because the mass media did not offered
the possibility to “talk” to each person at a time.
82
Marketing in Hypermedia Computer-Mediated Environments: Conceptual Foundations (p. 5)
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
On top of it, the buying is done on expectations. Obviously, newspapers and
magazines can be accounted for in terms of sales. After all, it is not difficult to
realise how many non-sold newspapers are returned – the reason it is not difficult
to have this counting made is because it is done locally at the selling point. It is of
the seller’s interest to get some money back, so they are happy to count the
spares, if that means recovering money. But that does not account for the number
of people who have seen “page 5 advert”.
Obviously, this does not happen in television: there is no way of counting how
many people were in front of the device at a precise minute on a particular given
channel. The selling of ad place / time in television is done on the estimated
figures. “X” amount of people of this class are expected to be watching this
particular programme on telly at this time of the day. It is not accountable!
Moreover, one can always argue that even when the television is on, it does not
mean that people are watching it. We all have heard this somewhere, right?
So one can claim that another of the traditional mass media drawbacks is the
targeting, and that leads us to doubt the effectiveness of certain communication
efforts. Clearly if there was some capabilities of directly measuring the return of
investment (R.O.I.) on a particular advertising effort, the companies would be
happy, but there is none – not in television nor in the traditional mass media in
general. Fig. 8 and Fig. 9 give us a notion of how the process happens in
television for both placed ads (Fig. 8) and other modalities, such as bartering and
product placement (Fig. 9).
Fig. 8 –Traditional television Advertising Process (Placed Adverts)
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
Placed ads (Fig. 8) shows the advertiser (client) and its already existing
relationship with the consumers and this relationship can also be of no knowledge
at all. The existing relationship suffers a change with the services of an advertising
agency using other media than television (very simplified in this scheme). For the
media of television, the advertising agency creates the advert and then pays upon
an estimated number of viewers for airtime to the media buying companies. The
media buying companies buy airtime to the Television channel. Besides, we can
see that not only the audience but also the R.O.I. are not precise numbers. The
same happens in Fig. 9 that relates to bartering and product placement.
Fig. 9 –Traditional television Advertising Process (Bartering and Product Placement)
The main business difference between placed adverts, bartering and product
placement is that there is no advertising agency or media buying company in the
process. Instead, in the case of product placement, the advertiser pays the
programme’s producer – that can either be the TV channel or a production
company – for the product to be placed on screen. In bartering, the advertiser
pays the production company to produce a particular programme.
Obviously, over the time, the industry had come up with more accountable
advertising methods and so telemarketing made its debut, but the responses are
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
generally very low. Nevertheless, telemarketing mixed / allied to video-on-demand
appear to have an impressive potential in Interactive Television, as we will see in
part three. Also in the last part we will go over the drawbacks of nowadays
Television advertising.
Future Advertising
The new media and their technology overcome many of the earlier described
constraints, as Randall Rothenberg points: “The new media technologies, by
drastically reducing production and distribution costs and making possible almost
continual and instantaneous refinements in message, promise to increase the
efficiency of accountable advertising…”83. It is about these improvements the next
paragraphs are about.
Internet Advertising
“The Net is accountable. It is knowable. It is the highway leading marketers to their
Holy Grail: single-sourcing technology that can definitively tie the information
consumers perceive to the purchases they make”84.
Randall Rothenberg
Internet advertising is a world of its own! Any honest analyses of its panorama
would result on a text larger than the one you are reading at the present. The
investments made in this form of advertising have increased every year and are
expected to increase year after year. According to a forecast by Myers Reports
(www.myers.com), the online expenditures for the U.S. market have come from
$1,500, representing a market share of 0.9% in 1998, to a predicted $9,921 spent
and a 4,9 share for the year 200685. Another source, Direct Marketing Association
(DMA), reports that a total of USD 2,8 billion was spent on online marketing in
2000. However big this figure might appear, it represents almost one sixth of the
predicted 2005 figure, expected to be of 14,6 billion86.
In this section, I intend to give a brief overview on Internet advertising, obviously
focusing on some of its key aspects. Nevertheless, the above figures are important
so that one can understand how fast has been and will be its progression.
It appears important to make a point here: if we think for a while, it makes sense
that a new medium is developed under the roots of other already existing media.
This process is – or should be – temporary. Let us call it, for the sake of this
argument, a new medium “self-discovering” phase.
83
Bye-Bye (p. 4)
Bye-Bye (p. 4)
85 Figures in Millions
86 Online Users – Uses and Users of the Internet (p. 15)
84
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
Take television as an example: chances are that a bit everywhere worldwide the
beginning of television broadcasting was based on a slowly move from the radio
presenters to the screen. Not only that, but most importantly, the Shape / Form /
Format of the first television programmes must have been fundamentally inspired
on the available radio programmes. In its early days, the only addition television
was making to the medium of radio would be that of being imagery enhanced,
leaving so much potential concealed and so many possibilities unexplored. A bit
like Barry Diller points out “To define television as radio with pictures may have
been accurate, but it missed the point entirely”87.
After the growing pains, the new medium will define its own new paths, for its roots
slowly start evolving into something new, something that has self-language with its
own grammar and a completely new relation with the audience. One of the
funniest sides of the media is that once they go through its briefly described “selfdiscovering” phase, they start a never-ending and ongoing maturation process.
Television has been around for half a century already and still advertising in this
medium is evolving, as we have seen a while ago in traditional advertising.
Clearly Internet as a medium is still in its “self-discovering” phase. Nevertheless, in
advertising terms, it quickly stampeded out of television’s (traditional media)
shadow to set its very own landmarks, which go far beyond the advertising field.
However, the chances are that, upon the convergence of the two (e.g. Interactive
Television), it will be Internet, and not television, to set the standards for
advertising. A bit like the story where the apprentice / beginner supplant his
master. As Michael Schrage points out “…tomorrow’s soft-ads are going to reflect
the values of the Net more than tomorrow’s Net will evolve into a digital
regurgitation of today’s advertising”88. Nowadays extensive and expensive
software applications “run” advertising and marketing on Internet. These new tools
appear a bit everywhere helping marketers and advertisers with this delicate
process. If not, let us have a look at how advertising is being done on Internet and
why it is predictable that as soon as Internet capabilities and television are
combined in the same device it is going to be the technology used on Internet to
lay down the rules.
For the purpose of their study “How Internet Advertising Works”89, Rex Briggs and
Horst Stipp divided Internet advertising onto three ample categories: placed
adverts (banner advertising), sponsored elements within sites (which to a certain
extent are an adaptation of sponsors programmes and bartering in television) and
company marketing sites also known as target communications90. We will see
banner advertising right away and under database marketing you will find
references to sponsored elements and marketing sites (target communications).
Don’t Repackage – Redefine (p. 2)
Is Advertising Dead? (p. 2)
89 Net Effects (pp. 133-141)
90 Referred like that by Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak
87
88
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
Banner Advertising
One of the ways that advertising happens on the Internet is through a banner.
According to the site Bannertips.com (www.bannertips.com), a banner is “Short for
"banner advertisement". A graphic or image used for advertising on the Internet”.
Usually this image is also a link that once clicked takes the user to the advertisers’
site, as D. Hoffman and T. Novak define, “Banner advertisements typically provide
little information beyond the identification of the sponsor and serve as an invitation
for the visitor to click on the banner to learn more”91. Banner use for Internet
advertising is believed to have started in 1994 more specifically in October 27th,
the day the hotwired site (www.hotwired.com) went first online. It was a banner for
ATT American Telephones & Telegraph (Fig.10) but it must have been a very
clumsy start, as we will see.
Fig. 10 –The First Internet Banner- For AT&T hosted on www.Hotwired.com (September 1994)92
On the book “CYBERMARKETING - Your Interactive Marketing Consultant”, there
is a brief description of those times for online advertising, and that small paragraph
says it all, it must have been a very hard start: “…At that time, there were no
standards for measurement or valuation. There were no industry structures to
support the buying and selling of ad space. There were no information sources
and no history…”93 and, if we think for a while, what hotwired and its first
commercial partners did in the beginning must have been to simply adapt the
television model to the Internet. And that makes sense, since there was not a
developed market measuring system or targeting tools at that time. As D. Hoffman
and T. Novak state, “Flat fees were the earliest Web advertising pricing model.
Flat fee pricing may be implemented with or without traffic (the amount of
individuals who visit a Web site) guarantees. Naturally, it would be advantageous
to the advertiser to request guarantees of traffic level. The earliest advertising
pricing approaches on the Web simply used flat fees, such as advertisement cost
per month, without clear specification of the traffic delivered in that period of
time”94.
At the time, Wired magazine (printed version) was already a reference worldwide
with a quite niche target audience. This targeting capability was good for their
advertisers but it was not enough. Wired’s online version soon settled to follow the
magazine’s footprints. Nevertheless, they where being pioneers, they were
working on virgin snow, on a never stepped ground, in which they envisioned to
91
Advertising Pricing Models for the World Wide Web (p. 5)
Scanned picture taken from Bannertips (www.bannertips.com)
93 Cybermarketing – Your Interactive marketing Consultant (p. 248)
94 Advertising Pricing Models for the World Wide Web (pp. 7-8)
92
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
have a future massive potential for advertising and businesses to be ran. So much
potential that the hotwired site is regarded to have started based on an advertising
business model or, in other words, as a commercial website – in a sense, like
commercial television channels, although they had no way to measure the number
of contacts made.
They proved right and the potential blasted far beyond Wired’s online version,
quickly spreading throughout the Internet, with thousands of commercial sites
appearing like mushrooms. The growth of Internet nurtured the need for directories
and portals, making them the next big thing in advertising terms. According to a
recent report relating to 2000 online advertising, 5 web portals / directories are the
top sellers of advertising space: Yahoo leads with USD 197.3 million followed by
AOL (USD 174.2 million), Excite (USD 90 million), Lycos (USD 61 million) and
Altavista (USD 50 million)95.
In spite of the impressive figures presented so far, we must not forget that the
beginning was not easy nor it was clear.
Since its beginnings, Internet advertising has always generated various struggles
mostly because it was a new media and as such it lacked standards. Although
institutions like Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB)96 exist since 1996, it was only
possible this year (specifically August 6th) to set some standards for online
advertising. Nowadays and according to the latest IAB guidelines for Internet
advertising, banner advertising can be characterized under three different
categories: Size, Technology and Implementation. Size relates to the screen area
taken by the advert (Banner). Technology relates to the interactivity of the advert
and it can fall on two categories: Static Banners (either image banners or GIFs)
and Rich Media or Non-Static Banners. The last category relates to the type of
implementation chosen for a particular banner, which can be On-the-page, Overthe-page or Interstitial (also known as transitional).
In terms of sizes there are various formats. We are not going to cover them all, but
we will have a look at the most conventional and most used ones. The first and
also the most used has the shape of a rectangle with 468*60 pixels area, and sits
usually on the top of the page though it can be also found at the bottom of the
page. These are commonly called banners or full banners and they are the ones
whose area size is most rigid. The second is known by the name of skyscraper
and is, by opposition to the first, a vertical rectangle. Its dimensions can vary
especially width wise (there are two common sizes 120px and 160px), its height is
usually fixed to a value of 600 pixels, and it is usually placed on one side of the
page. The third referred to as rectangle or large rectangle is the most area variable
of the three (ranging from 240*400, 336*280, 360*300, 300*250)97, and also the
less used one. Especially because of its prices that are very high.
95
Online ad spend down on last year (p. 1)
Available online from: http://www.iab.net
97 All values in pixels
96
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
In terms of technology, as we have seen, they differ between Static Banners
(either Image Banners or GIFs) and Rich Media or Non-Static Banners. Static
banners are the most simple to explain and also the most common Internet
advertising units representing about 80% of online advertising, according to a
spokesperson from Doubleclick98. It is basically an area of the screen that displays
a visual commercial message. Forget not that the medium was and still is
evolving, so it makes sense that this simple advertising method is not only the
most used but also the first graphic adverting unit to be introduced. It is also the
one that most resembles traditional newspaper and magazine advertising.
Nevertheless, as an advertising unit, it has evolved a lot from its early technical
constraints to what it can be nowadays. In the beginning, banners were nothing
more than a hyperlinked image – image banners. Then the exploration of an
image file format like Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) and the developments on
the users Internet connections allowed very simple animations (Fig. 11) to bring
some life to banner advertising.
Fig. 11 – Tokaki Full Banner in frames (2001)
98
At the “Advertising and the Digital Media” conference, held in Lisbon in October 2001
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
Although Static Banners are the simplest form of Internet advertising, in its very
basics they are like a newspaper advert with two enhancements: a simple
animation and a hyperlink. Having said that, it is important to say that good
creative can be found on banners and I am sure a trip to Bannertips
(www.bannertips.com) will make my point.
Rich Media Banners
The second category, rich media banner or rich media Internet advertising, is
much more complex and difficult to explain. Let us say that it was through its use
that advertising finally started talking Multimedia and Internet language. It is
basically a mixture of several different media combined to get the user to do
something (interact) with an advertising message. I would apply Trip Hawkins’
sentence stating the importance of multimedia to describe this sort of adverts. For
him, “In the sense that audio is the medium of hearing, and video is the medium of
viewing, multimedia is the medium of ‘doing’ ”99. Definitely I think this sort of
adverts fall in a multimedia category.
They have no specific shape, although they might fall under IAB’s banner size
guidelines. They have no specific duration or set of tasks to be completed, and
can be implemented anyhow. Actually, they have no restrictions to creativity and
no constraint parameters other than those inherent to a PC and its connection to
the Internet – which is in itself the main constraint of them all.
At the moment, they are still on an embryonic stage or, if you prefer, like a good
wine is put to vats, so are rich media adverts debuting. IAB guidelines divided Rich
Media Banners on some categories: GIFs, Audio, Video, Flash, JAVA, HTML and
DHTML.
GIFs we have already covered. Audio and Video are self-explanatory: they
combine audio and video elements on a web environment.
Flash is a software created by Macromedia™ that allows the creation of very small
sized multimedia files. This way the user experience can be not only enhanced but
also much more rewarding, although there is a flip side to this coin: the
technology’s main drawback is that it requires the user at home to have the Flash
plug-in installed on his computer. Unfortunately for both the advertisers and
Macromedia™, not all Internet users are able to download and run the installation.
That is the main reason why the downloading and installation processes have
become one and much more easy to accomplish on its later versions.
JAVA, HTML and DHTML capabilities are very similar to Flash. The main
difference is that instead of being software designed the animations and
applications are all done through coding. The main concern with these
technologies is towards what browser version the user is running. The two main
99
Trip Hawkins in Cybermarketing – Your Interactive marketing Consultant (p. 39)
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
drawbacks of this technology are the users’ computer processing power and how
is it connected to Internet, and the already mentioned browser version.
To sum up, I would say that technology is developing, enlarging the online
advertising horizons two ways. The first is the release of powerful computers and
faster Internet connections, which allows more creative liberty. The second is that
new software allowed – through the use of plug-ins on the users end – to see the
file size of these kinds of small multimedia applications reduced.
On top of these two and more important in my opinion, is the fact that users and
the uses of Internet developed as well. Users have become more permeable to
technology and also built up an understanding of the logic and grammar of these
not so new multimedia products. We just need to bear in mind that this is an
endless “maturation” process like the one described earlier in relation to television,
in which the user wants more every time he / she feels the solutions are becoming
outdated.
Implementation relates to the way the banner is going to appear on the screen.
There are basically three categories upon which it might fall: On-The-Page, OverThe-Page or Pop-Up, and Interstitial or Transitional.
On-The-Page mixes with the page contents like newspaper or magazine
advertising, in which its placement is done regarding to the size (area) of the
banner.
Over-The-Page, also known as Pop-Up, is a kind of implementation that forces the
user’s browser to open a new window on which the banner gets its impression.
Basically, whenever a user clicks on a link, the window that was already open
starts downloading the desired page while a new one opens to display the banner.
This kind of implementation has an important drawback: there is nothing more
annoying than a window opening over the contents that one really wants to
access. So what happens is that between the time the new window opens and the
time it takes for the banner to be fully loaded on that same window, the user has
already closed the window. Meaning that there is no full impression.
Interstitial or Transitional are very alike to television adverts: they appear for an “X”
amount of time – IAB recommends a maximum of 7 sec – before the desired page
is loaded. In a sense, their main disadvantage is that they delay the users’ access
to the required content. But this delay means that there is a strong possibility for
the user to get to see the advert, just because the desired content will appear after
it has been displayed. So the advertising has a great chance of finding the user
looking at the screen.
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
Banner Targeting
An example of targeting technology applied to banner advertising can be that of
Doubleclick (www.doubleclick.com): Direct Advertising Report Targeting (DART)
solution. DART is on its 5th version since it appeared in 1996. The solution /
platform is capable of targeting advertising on several criteria aspects. Fig. 12
gives us an idea of what these criteria might be.
Fig. 12 –Targeting Criteria Enabled / Claimed by Doubleclick DART Solution100
The way this claimed targeting is achieved is very easy to understand. Each
browser has a unique ID number, enabling Internet advertising servers to track,
not who (a specific person), but which browser is accessing a certain site. Clever,
isn’t it? This way they claim, since what is tracked is a browser ID and not a user,
that there is no privacy intrusion. With or without privacy intrusion, this technique
enables, by the way the user of that browser behaves (interacts) on its surfing
experiences, the software to draw a “user” profile. On top of this, during a surfing
experience there is exchanged information between the user’s browser and the
server of the site being accessed. This information is saved on the user’s
computer under a text file, which is called cookie. So, if the user accesses one site
few days later, it is possible to track which browser ID is that one and recreate a
strategy for that “user” upon the results previously saved. Not only there is a realtime individualized strategy being created as the user browses through, but also its
navigation path is stored for later analyses and possible further one-to-one
dialogues. It is just like a dream for advertisers and marketers: consumers’
information is made available so that they may improve their commercial
dialogues. Obviously with this kind of information targeting becomes easier!
But it is not only the targeting that becomes easy. Corrections and improvements
are also new words on the new media vocabulary. The system enables the
tracking of what the user does upon an advertising unit that is shown: whether the
invitation is accepted or not (i.e. If the banner is clicked or not). Based on the
acceptance average results of a particular creative, the advertiser can chose to
replace it by another creative solution or leave it online because it is doing fine. If
the choice is to replace it, the costs a new banner creation represents are very low
when compared to the traditional media. Moreover, it can be done in real time.
100
Picture taken from Doubleclick Website (www.doubleclick.com)
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
So as we have seen, banner advertising on Internet allows the advertisers to
control many important aspects of the advertising efforts. This control was
unthinkable with the old media or, at least, it was in a sense more like a dream
than a possibility.
How is it accountable?
Generally an Internet advertising campaign is booked upon a number of targeted
impressions that the advertiser wants to have fulfilled. These can obviously be
targeted on a unique end-user basis, meaning that one given creative will only be
shown once to a single given browser ID number. Usually it is charged on a CPM
(Cost per Thousand Impressions) basis. On top of it, there is also a price for CPC
(Cost Per Click) or a cost for CTR (Clickthrough Rate), which is charged whenever
the end-user takes on the banner invitation to go to the advertisers’ web site. This
practice came to prove that the price the advertiser had to pay for each single enduser that took on the advert was quite a big amount of money. Also and most
importantly, the advertising accounting practices were still those of the old media,
based on the number of exposures and on an intrusive advertising approach.
So sooner or later someone would change the practice, as Donna Hoffman and
Thomas Novak point: “Procter & Gamble, the nation’s leading traditional
advertiser, was one of the first companies to move to results-oriented pricing for
Web based advertising. In April 1996, Yahoo agreed to Procter & Gamble’s
requirement that it be paid only for the click-through on P&G’s banner ads, and not
on the basis of mere exposures. This is because clickthroughs represent a
measure of active interest in the advertiser’s message, as opposed to the passive
interest a consumer is assumed to show when she browses a page containing an
advertiser’s banner ad”101.
This change in the advertising accounting practices supported by Yahoo was of
greater importance since its impact was of a worldwide scale. Moreover, we can
envision a possible evolution in which the advertiser pays the rest of the players
upon results – e.g. a percentage of the total sales for a particular client – meaning
that advertising becomes a group of companies' effort, in which everyone shares
the revenues. However, the described above is the usual web advertising practice,
some small sites still account their advertising using flat fees – e. g. time-based
such as weeks.
Until very recently, there were still some doubts about the effectiveness of online
advertising, either towards the size and creative of a given advert (banner) or
towards the effects online advertising had on the consumers. A recent Advertising
Unit Effectiveness study undertaken by Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) /
Dynamic Logic came out with many interesting findings from which I would point
out two: first, banner advertising is suitable for branding on Internet; and second,
rich media banner win over to static banners in terms of clickthrough rate102.
101
102
When Exposure-Based Web Advertising Stops Making Sense (p. 6)
For more information please consult IAB web site available at: www.iab.com
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Rich media banners, as we have seen earlier, are debuting on making a better use
of the technical resources of the Web. Moreover, they also represent the
beginning of the use of new linguistics and grammar, which are inherent to this
medium and should obviously extend to advertising.
Database Marketing
Database is “a collection of data that is stored in a computer and that can easily be
used...”103.
Database Marketing is based on database (DB solutions) software packages
meaning that users’ data is collected to be later analysed. Based on those
analyses, data is transformed into customers’ information, very valuable
customers’ information! The process is called Data-Mining (DM). And according to
Wired’s Encyclopaedia of the New Economy104, 95% or more of all American
companies “now use some form of data mining - often nothing more than mailing
lists”105.
The reason why the information that comes out of the process is so important and
so valuable is because it refers to people. For example, what can be more
important to the entertainment business than people’s habits, preferences, likes,
dislikes and so on? This data is collected mostly through the analyses of people’s
Internet surfing experiences and includes research queries, amongst other user’s
practices. I say mostly, because some people are still very reluctant to provide
their personal and banking information over the Internet. As we can see by the
numbers from the study “Online Ciberfaces” undertook by ISCTE in 2000, which
points that, according to its sample, 50.3% have never done online shopping –
amongst them, I would emphasize that 20.1% were afraid of providing their credit
card number, 5.1% did not knew how online transactions work, 5% had doubts
about online transactions. So, it appears that the Web is still not a quite trustable
media among Portuguese users.
As such, this data collecting is mainly done using cookies and for the advertisers
this sort of knowledge information about people is priceless, since it enables the
targeting of products and commercial messages to become easier and obviously
more effective than before.
So valuable this information can be that there are companies whose business is a
complete financial loss, but they do not go bankrupt. Instead, they become the
most highly quoted on the market share. These kinds of companies created
through their business something called added value.
103
Collins Cobuild (p. 413)
Available Online from: www.wired.com
105 http://hotwired.lycos.com/special/ene/index.html?nav=part_one&word=data
104
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Let us have a look to one of the most used Internet examples, Amazon
(www.amazon.com). Amazon is a virtual bookstore – it is correct, but also very
incomplete. For being an online bookstore, Amazon managed to sell millions of
books to millions of single individuals – it is getting better, but it still is incomplete.
Over the past few years, Amazon sold millions of books to millions of people and
many of these persons bought from Amazon more than one book. Meanwhile, as
people were buying books, Amazon was gathering their reading preferences and
creating a very, very big database of reading preferences of people all over the
world. Besides, I think it is more appropriate if we can add that Amazon
encourages readers to talk to other readers about books they read or are reading
(remember online communities). Seth Godin writes about a new must for
marketers in the future, which he calls “Permission Marketing”. The author defends
that the future is all about having permission from the consumers to establish
dialogues, and he defends that this permission appears through trusted
relationships built over time step by step. He predicts that Amazon’s big boom will
be when the company decides to start publishing books. The author says, “They
(Amazon) are building special interest communities in which Amazon and its
costumers will be able to talk to each other about specific genres of books. Why?
Where’s the payoff? The payoff comes the day Amazon decides to publish books.
This is where the profit lies and where Amazon is best able to leverage their
permission asset”106.
We already mentioned the Mp3 movement107: one of the main engines for it to
grow and expand the way it did was the Napster software and web site
(www.napster.com). Napster enables Mp3 music file exchange between users
worldwide. During the time its site was on, many, many people used its capabilities
to download music. It is argued that meanwhile Napster was running, it was
gathering information about people’s musical preferences to later sell their
databases to record companies. As Elliot Prado argues, “I think they wanted to set
up a system where they would track what people were downloading and sell that
information to the record companies. That’s where their profit would have been
made”108. And he continues “But they underestimated the rage of the music
industry”109.
We can clearly see how valuable can clients’ information be for a company.
Depending on the adopted strategy, clients’ information can be a very useful
resource for future investments or business models. Moreover, a one-to-one
dialogue can be established between the company and a client, ensuring that the
client will come back or, at least, will not be lost over to another competitor. On the
other hand, it allows the company to remember every single client preferences and
needs. It is like Michael Schrage says: “… companies will have a new advantage:
the computational power to remember every detail of a customer’s transaction
history. (It’s about time. After all, customers have always been able to remember
their interactions with companies.) Manufacturers and service providers are
106
Permission Marketing (p. 20) Available online on request
For more information check “Mp3 Rocks The Web” available at http://www.wired.com/news/mp3
108 Why Music Trading Won’t Die (p. 3)
109 Why Music Trading Won’t Die (p. 3)
107
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bringing to market an increasing assortment of highly customized goods and
services – “customerized” products, individually taylored to meet individual needs,
one customer at a time”110. Obviously good commercial relationships can be built
this way.
New Media Advertising
As we already pointed out, one of the key features in new media is the ability of
user input. So to describe this new approach to the broadcasting of marketing
messages over the new media, Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak propose one
model (Fig.13) that can help us understand how new kind of relationships can be
built. Opposing to the previous model (Fig. 7), we can see that this model is
somehow detaching itself from the linear communication approaches already
studied. It seems to tend more to a circular approach like the one proposed by
Gerbner. Still we can see that it does not contemplate the importance of groups
and communities, which are, in my opinion, not only one of the most important
Internet breakthroughs, but also a very important feature of interactive television,
as we will see further, when analysing interactive television.
Fig. 13 –New Model of Marketing Communications in Hypermedia Computer Mediated Environment (1995)111
110
111
Is Advertising Dead? (p. 7)
Marketing in Hypermedia Computer-Mediated Environments: Conceptual Foundations (p. 7)
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Nevertheless, this model provides us visuals, which can help us understand the
changes that Internet has enabled in the process of advertising. Moreover, it
allows us to comprehend how the changes in media buying and strategy apply to
this particular medium where everything can be accounted for, a medium which
allows information personalisation, regardless of being distributed to millions or to
a single individual, and enables the establishment of sole dialogues whenever
necessary (in a sense, as the well known sentence “Broadcasting to millions one a
time”).
Internet Media Placement & Strategy
Internet advertising, either practices of placed ads (banners) or sponsored
elements within sites – which we have already classified to a certain extent as
adaptation of sponsored programmes and bartering in television – can be seen in
a general way in Fig. 14.
Fig. 14 –Internet Advertising (Banner and Sponsored Elements)
The model shows the advertiser (client) and its already existing relationship with
the consumers, which can be of no knowledge at all. The existing relationship
suffers a change with the services of an Advertising Agency using other media
than Internet, as already seen for Television Advertising in Fig. 8 (Traditional
Television Advertising Process). Again in Banner Advertising, the Advertising
Agency creates the advert and finds a company to produce it, and then pays the
Media Buying Companies or directly the web site for a certain number of contacts /
consumers. If the services of a media buying company are used, then the contact
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with the Web Site is done by them. In the case of Sponsored Elements within a
site, the contact is usually done directly between the advertiser and the Web Site.
In this scheme, we can see the main differences between Internet advertising and
television advertising. Those differences are mainly two: the first relates to the
number of contacts made just using Internet, and the second can be partially
accountable regarding to possible online buys (Effective Return of Investment).
Obviously, there is also a “dark side” that is not directly accountable (just like both
television models presented before – Fig. 8 and Fig. 9) regarding to an eventual
(Possible Return of Investment) offline buy (on Internet talk), brand-awareness or
even to the building or strengthening of an already existing relationship with the
customer (Customer Relationship). This last aspect has a great importance, as it
was emphasized before, in the Internet advertising section (Database Marketing).
But even Internet advertising is subject to new advertising experiments everyday.
In 1994, Michael Schrage pointed out that advertising was evolving to a less
hidden business. As we have seen, media costs are cut down on the consumer’s
wallet by placed advertising, often without the consumer’s knowledge – i.e., the
consumer sees the advert but does not directly relate it to the price he pays for the
medium. The author imagined that, in the future Interactive Television, when a set
was switched on, its owners would be getting offers such as: “Watch this two
minute video on the new Ford Taurus, and we’ll pay for the pay-per-view movie or
your choice”112 or even “Answer this brief survey from Kellogg and we’ll pay for the
next three episodes of Murphy Brown”113.
An illustration of this explicit advertising relationship could be this situation, pointed
by some friends of mine that were out of their country for a few days. To check
their e-mails and to be easily reached, they went often to cybercafes. One, they
later described to me, had a set of sponsor companies that placed “bonus time”
banners, meaning that if someone using a cybercafe’s computer clicked on a
banner, he/she could win free extra browsing time. This turns true the words on
Michael Schrage’s sentence “Let’s Make a Deal (If You Pay Attention, We Will Pay
Your Way)”114. Later, I researched the cafe’s web site115 – which I seriously
recommend having a look – to realise that probably more than half of their
earnings are made of advertising, both on location or even overriding already
placed advertising (banners) in user requested web sites.
Maybe we can easily get to the conclusion that, in Internet advertising terms, “what
is an experiment today can become tomorrow’s standard”. The future appears to
be bright for Interactive Television Advertising.
112
Is Advertising Dead? (p. 6)
Is Advertising Dead? (p. 6)
114 Is Advertising Dead? (p. 6)
115 Cybercafe eeasyeverything available online at www.eeasyeverything.com
113
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Interactive Television Advertising
Now that we have analysed, although rather briefly, some models of
communication and have seen them applied to television and Internet advertising,
it is time to start looking at Interactive television advertising, bearing in mind all
that we have seen so far.
Leos de Vos points that: “Judging on the way television and the World Wide Web
are used today, a logical conclusion would be that ITV will be used in both social
contexts too. The practice of viewing and using lTV will have to show it. On the
one hand, ITV could become a very individual activity, because of the possibilities
to customize the content to one’s own personal interests…”116. One can think
about this reflection and envision this happening. I mean, we all know what it feels
like not to have the remote control when we are watching telly. The bad mood or
annoyance related to not having the power is even more accentuated if, instead of
a television, we are in front of a computer. The computer appears to be an even
more individual medium than television, as the author points out in Fig.-15.
Fig.-15 Kinds of Interaction Involved with the Computer (2000)117
Whereas with television families get together watching and making comments
amongst themselves (Fig. 16), we can find it difficult to see a family gathered
together around a PC while one of them browses the Internet at his own will.
Fig.-16 Kinds of Interaction Involved with Television (2000)118
116
Searching for the Holy Grail, Images of Interactive television (p. 43)
Searching for the Holy Grail, Images of Interactive television (p. 44)
118 Searching for the Holy Grail, Images of Interactive television (p. 44)
117
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Nevertheless, Leos de Vos points two more interesting factors: video games as
both individual and group experiences, and the PC plus Internet as an individual
tool for socialisation (especially if we think about the group communities and other
aspects already covered before while describing the Internet medium). So he
continues saying: “…On the other hand, the development of multi user devices
and interfaces that stimulate group use of ITV could enhance the social character
of interactive television”119. The author puts forward a first model (Fig. 17) in which
he just points out the kind of interactions one might be able to perform through the
convergence of the two previous models.
Fig.-17 Kinds of Interaction Involved with Interactive Television (2000)120
His idea is that ITV can have, as television has, social connotations (Fig. 16) – e.
g. a family in the same living room making the interaction both human–human and
human–medium. Also it can have lone human–medium and human–medium–
human interactions, when a game console is used with television or when
someone accesses Internet using a PC. When we start thinking of all the aspects
of the Internet that we already covered so far, and following the same line of
thought, it is easy to imagine that soon we can have an explosive mixture of all
sorts of interactions, such as human–medium interaction, human–human
interaction and human–medium–human interaction, regardless the physical and
social environment surrounding them. The author then presents a contextual
model (Fig. 18) in which these possible interactions appear in different physical
spaces under the name of context.
119
120
Searching for the Holy Grail, Images of Interactive television (p. 43)
Searching for the Holy Grail, Images of Interactive television (p. 45)
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Fig.-18 Leos de Vos Contextual model for Interactive Television (2000)121
One can imagine these contexts as of major importance for the future of
Interactive Television content developments (on a interactivity level), as they can
bring several new dimensions in terms of play and user involvement. An example
of this can be the impressive figures of ITV in UK. Apparently more than 7 million
people voted using the phone or ITV on Big Brother Reality Show. But more
impressive are the Sky Channel’s 89 million ITV game players a month.
So thinking of all that we have covered so far in this text, we can see Interactive
Television in advertising and marketing terms as the bringing together of all the
power Internet has as a new medium and the “true to life” characteristic of
television pointed by Helen Katz. The assemblage of both appears like a dream for
advertisers and marketers. An explosive combination to be exploited!
121
Searching for the Holy Grail, Images of Interactive television (p. 46)
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“Futuristic / Creative” Media Placement
Interactive Television advertising is still to be defined, but one thing is for sure: it is
up to us who work in all the several branches of the industry to broaden its
boundaries and keep looking forward to the new challenges that technology is
going to set in the future.
We must not look at these new challenges as constraints, following Michael
Schrage’s idea that it means more power to the user. Instead we must look at
them and try to find something that pitches our imagination off limits, enabling the
viewers, users, consumers, whatever you want to call them, to be entertained and
amused while we sell our products.
This is the only way to make advertising worth the money spent: if its revenues go
down, then there is no point in having a group of people being paid to create
advertising messages, because a computer can do that, maybe in some cases
more efficiently. Obviously this future is happening right now, and that means
keeping our jobs! Just hope that in this process we are lucky enough to have some
fun, playing around with technologies already available and with those that are still
to emerge!
Convergence or Advertising Mix?
In his article Bye-Bye, Randall Rothenberg argues the blurring between
advertising and marketing as a cause of new technology and, in my opinion, it is
more or less what is happening in the new media panorama. He says: “The
spurious distinction between image advertising and retail advertising will erode,
then disappear, as each advertisement, every product placement, all editorial can
be tied to transactions”122.
Another author, Michael Schrage, argued in 1994: “Ads will become software
seducers, enticing and guiding customer interaction. Advertising, information, and
transaction would begin to blur. Interactive ads can evolve into compelling direct
response environments – Informative, intimate, and immediate”123.
After the analyses of Internet advertising, one can see that this blurring between
advertising and marketing processes is an already ongoing process, rolling like a
small snowball that is getting bigger on each rotation.
122
123
Bye-Bye (p. 4)
Is Advertising Dead? (p. 4)
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Conclusion
This part started with some brief considerations about how the new technologies
actually happen to be used, once they are available to the consumers. The point
was to re-stress the importance this factor will have on the new medium of
Interactive Television. Obviously a working definition for interactivity had to follow
this introduction. For practical reasons, it seemed appropriate to use Leos de Vos
and Van Djik's definition of interactivity – after all, it came out of a study
undertaken on the subject of Interactive Television.
Pacing was the following concept to be introduced – after all, many of the new
media features come out of the way pacing can now be done. In the beginning, it
was mainly external (traditional media - Radio and Television), with some
exceptions of internal pacing (newspapers and books), and nowadays it is
essentially internal or mixed, depending on the situation (Internet and ITV).
After considering interactivity and pacing, we moved on to analyse basic
communication models and its characteristics – after all, that is where all the
communication science finds its roots, advertising included. So, after considering
the models, they were applied to the advertising communication processes
undertaken in the media analysed in part one.
Following these considerations, we introduced the ways advertising is done in
each of the already existing media – Television and Internet. This was focused on
the various shapes in which the advertising messages are broadcasted in these
media. Obviously we focused on the adverts’ shapes and on refinements made in
media buying throughout the time. Under Internet advertising, we explained briefly
how the process got to be accounted throughout the use of cookies and browser
ID numbers.
These analyses were combined with marketing models of one-to-many and oneto-one marketing relationships. This reflection should have provided us enough
background to develop further our concept of ITV, introducing the various possible
contexts upon which ITV is watched and / or used. These contexts should be
reflected on ITV advertising – after all, they are part of ITV Unique Selling Point
(U.S.P.).
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Part III
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Introduction
Now that we have made a small trip onto the world of advertising and media,
communication and different media capabilities, it is time to wrap it all and start
taking some conclusions. But before, let us sum up what we have seen in the first
two parts.
In Part One, we looked at advertising, its mission and the players involved in the
advertising process, followed by a small trip onto a working definition of mass
media. After this, we focused on one example of a traditional mass media,
Television, and its impact in our lives as a one-to-many communications media.
Under new media, we have overseen the Internet and its capabilities of one-tomany and one-to-one communication processes. This two short considerations /
examples of mass media allowed us to frame the media of Interactive Television,
which seems to combine the social issues of “old” television with the
superimposed technological aspects of Internet. Nevertheless, we concluded that
it is still too early to envision what Interactive Television will become. In fact, its
evolution will depend predominantly on users’ requests and needs, and not solely
on what the industry is, decides or tries to enforce.
In Part Two, we started by looking at technology and its possible mislead uses as
an alert to the possible unforeseen utilisations of a given new medium. From these
considerations, we moved on to a notion of interactivity, followed by the concept of
pacing, as they appear of greater importance to understand the weight a back
channel can have on a communication process. At this point, we brought up some
simple communication models to later apply them to advertising – firstly to
Traditional Media (Television) and secondly to the New Media (Internet).
Under the Television Advertising analyses, we have seen the most common
advertising forms and how they relate to a mass media communication marketing
relationship. Moreover, we have seen how media strategy and buying is done on
television, based on estimated numbers both for audiences and for revenues.
Following this, we introduced the advertising practices on Internet and showed
how they are mainly based on Internet’s measuring capability. We related Internet
advertising to a one-to-one marketing relationship and presented how media
strategy and buying is done on such medium, which obviously opposes to that of
mass media.
Having made these considerations, we moved to a contextual analysis of
Interactive Television, because it seems to be a very important background – after
all, it is under this different context that ITV user relations are to take place. It is
obviously of greater importance for marketers and advertisers, since it will be
under these multiple possible relations that ITV has its major breakthrough.
As a final point, I would say that we have seen – in general and emphasised by
the online advertising – that the borders between advertising and marketing are
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getting so blurred that it gets more difficult every day to separate the two activities.
Maybe deep down on an industry’s point of view, they ought to be tightened
together as strongly as possible, without tearing the rope. We can say that this is
not a new tendency. After all, in the past years advertising agencies slowly started
claiming their ability to “communicate” rather than their ability to do “advertising”.
The book “Cybermarketing” points three possible changes for the role of
advertising agencies. The first defends that it will evolve “…From carnival barker to
communication clearinghouse”124. Which means “…the essential character of the
advertising agency evolve from that of a barker on the mass-media midway-of
simple slogans and “unique selling points,” to that of an online mediator of
comparative and compelling information that will assist the consumer at every
stage of the consumption cycle”125. The second argues that it will evolve “From
working for the media and the advertisers… to working with the consumer”126.
Although this statement is self-explanatory, the book explain clarifies: “…opposed
to the advertiser of the past, the interactive advertiser sees his task less as a
pitchman for sponsors than as a consultant for consumers”127. The third defends
that there will be a change “From the marketing concept to the communication
concept”128 and argues: “Future advertising success will be found in giving the
consumer the easiest, most rewarding access to relevant information before,
during and after the purchase. Interactive technology enables the advertiser to
personalize his approach to every customer and exchange relevant information
that will prove mutually beneficial”129.
Clearly, these changes on the role of the Advertising Agency, combined with the
new media improvements, are having and will continue to have its reflections on
the adverts themselves (remember the Internet advertising part). As new media
emerge, new ways of advertising will obviously materialise. The only thing that can
be stated regarding the future of advertising and the new media is that advertisers
will want to see direct results from their advertising efforts. After all, that is one of
the big breakthroughs of new technology.
We will start this part by pointing the drawbacks of television advertising and then
we will direct our thoughts to the U.S.P. of New Media Advertising. After these
considerations, it will be appropriate to design some scenarios for Interactive
Television Advertising.
CyberMarketing – Your Interactive Marketing Consultant (p. 81)
CyberMarketing – Your Interactive Marketing Consultant (p. 81)
126 CyberMarketing – Your Interactive Marketing Consultant (p. 82)
127 CyberMarketing – Your Interactive Marketing Consultant (p. 82)
128 CyberMarketing – Your Interactive Marketing Consultant (p. 83)
129 CyberMarketing – Your Interactive Marketing Consultant (pp. 83-84)
124
125
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October 2001
The Drawbacks of Nowadays Television Advertising
As we have seen, television can be considered a one-way information feed mass
media. If technically these limitations are materialised in a less engaging device,
the truth is that, with its 50 years history and its penetration rate, we can see that it
was worth a worldwide acceptance. If, on one hand, its technical constraints are
drawbacks, on the other, they can be very strong means to get messages through.
Television has the power of showing “reality” to a vast amount of people, even
when what is being shown is far from being an unbiased representation of reality.
For advertisers, television has been the ultimate media, reaching powerfully a
considerable amount of people. The “little box that changed the world” really did
change the world by reaching people everyday.
Nevertheless, in terms of advertising, television as we know it has many
drawbacks that can be easily overcome when it suffers a major “up-grade” as the
bringing of interactivity to the device appears to be. Some of television
weaknesses find its roots in the media strategy and in the media planning part of
the advertising process. Which is the core part of advertising in the new media that
brought powerful tools to target audiences with a more appropriate timing,
representing a better use of the advertising investments. Moreover, it allowed new
measuring features to be translated both to the creative and effectiveness fields,
enabling a possible combination between advertising and marketing on a neverending ongoing process. I think that an analyses of the drawbacks is more
understandable if it appears as a commented list:
Difficult to (exact) target: Television advertising cannot be much targeted, mainly
because television is by all means an “old” mass medium. This characteristic
makes television advertising to be profiled onto a quite broaden shape, so that its
reach is enlarged the most amongst its huge audience (see prime-time). If we
consider the penetration values of television in our western world, it becomes
easily understandable how difficult targeting is, when using this media. Obviously
different programmes, different channels and even different daytimes create
audience disparities, but there is always a bit of uncertainness.
Prime time: Because television is so widespread, it has become part of our lives,
not only socially but also mentally. Everyone talks about what they have seen on
telly last evening – that is a bit of the social role of television. Whether we like it or
not, there is always something in our conversations that is telly-related, that
someone has seen in a TV programme. Or if you prefer, many of our
conversations are television-generated. It seems that people feel the need to
watch television after a day of work just to relax. This is the mental part of us
aching for a bit of evening television that does not requires any thinking effort. This
gave birth to the expression “Couch Potato”. So television’s prime time appears to
be the advertiser’s dream time-slot to place / air their ads, as it catches millions of
eyeballs everyday. In Interactive Television, user time is prime time and it can be
any time of the day.
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Repetition / Frequency: Because millions watch television every day, advertisers
/ adverts became noticed upon repetition. It is funny to watch the same channel
one entire evening: sometimes we see the same advert 3 or even 4 times. This
also comes as a result of a fact: the more ad space advertisers buy, the cheaper it
is sold. Obviously forced repetition can be very annoying to the user.
Media Strategy / Planning and Buying: Moreover, media buying is done on a
promotion basis, meaning that the more time you buy, the cheaper each second
costs. This has mostly to do with the fact that the media buying companies work
as an intermediary on the process. They serve many advertisers and their goal is
to buy the television channels as much airtime as possible, so that their buying
prices are the lowest. Then they sell it to the advertisers the same way, but
cheaper compared to the price it would cost if the advertisers were buying it
directly to the TV Channel. Television advertising media planning and buying has
always been time-driven. After all, television advertising has always been
accounted for time, both the time of the day and the time-duration of a given
advert. It concerns the estimated number of people watching television at a given
time and how much does a second of airtime costs according to the estimated
number of viewers. Media Strategy / Planning is done a priori, which means that, if
there are unpredictable factors that alter the estimated audience, the change
cannot be accounted for. This lack of accounting features will be solved on ITV.
Measuring Audiences: Audiences are estimated so the prices do not change. If
by some reason no one watches the advert, the advertiser is losing money; if more
than the estimated number decides to watch, the television station looses. And
even when the advertiser wins on the estimated “audience battle” with the
channel, it is very difficult to figure it out on the sales.
Measuring results: It is very difficult for an advertiser to find out how much Return
of Investment (R.O.I.) its television campaigns do pull out. There are two important
reasons for this: first, more and more campaigns are done in more than one media
– the so-called media-mix – meaning that the results can only be accounted in
total and not for each media individually; moreover, unless you have some kind of
back channel, it is very difficult to determine the quality of the contacts made on
each single medium.
The shape and creative of one advert: It is very expensive to produce a
television advert (without even considering particular actors or directors).
Moreover, it is also very difficult to measure the effectiveness of a given advert.
But let us imagine that the effectiveness could be properly measured, leading to
the conclusion that, for a given ad, improvements had to be made. Going back to
the editing room is very expensive, not to mention re-shooting.
Having listed above the major drawbacks of television, it makes sense to list the
advantages of New Media Advertising focusing on Internet. Then, with these two
as a background, we can move on to a conclusions part, in which we will consider
what may happen when both are combined.
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The USP of New Media Advertising
We based our approach to new advertising on Internet as a mass media. There
are some reasons for that. First, as shown by the numbers presented in part 1,
Internet grew very quickly. Besides, it subverted the typical traditional media
feature of no back channel availability for the user, enabling consumers to
feedback the companies. There are obviously many other new media, but they are
not quite mass media yet. Devices like mobile phones and PDAs, amongst others,
will also have a word in the one to one future, as they can be used to reach a very
specific person with the exact timing. But, at the moment, Internet was and still is
the ultimate tool for advertisers and a tool that has fresh content almost everyday,
providing new lessons every week. Let us take a look at the major technology
improvements that enabled Internet to became a vital tool in terms of Advertising /
Marketing.
Targeting: Can be more accurate than that of the traditional media. The first
reason is the existence of a back channel. The user can provide its personal
information whenever he wants. But even without such information, the advertiser
can better target its ads through the use of cookies. If not to a specific user,
targeting can be made to a specific machine (via web browser). Moreover, the
user can browse through or solicit information to the advertiser, which, together
with cookies and browser IDs, opens new doors in media buying and planning.
Media strategy / planning and buying: As said earlier, these are the core
elements of new media advertising. As seen before, it is possible to target single
machines (browsers) and with that knowledge one can prevent overexposure, by
limiting the number of times an advert is shown to an individual (Repetition). This
prevention obviously takes place in Real-Time. Another improved feature is that of
measurement.
Effectiveness: These improvements also expanded to a better evaluation of a
given advert in terms of measuring its effectiveness. It is possible not only to
determine the exact number of viewers but also to find out the percentage of
persons that accepted the invitation (Audience Measurement). Moreover, it is
possible to track those who turn out to be customers, giving us the quality of the
contact, through that specific medium. As we have seen so far, Internet’s flexibility
and scalability reveal themselves key features to the advertiser. But there is more:
as a result of technology, one has now more control over the shape and creative
of a given advert.
The shape and creative of one advert: With the capacities already covered, it
became easier to determine how good is the creative of a given advert. If it
generates no response (user’s clicks), then it ought to be changed. Ad creative
can be changed very quickly; its costs (both to change and to make corrections)
are not stratospheric and, moreover, it can be done almost in real time.
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To sum up, we can say that all these technical features characterising the new
media have enabled the advertisers to adopt a more standardised and a more
personalised distribution of information (advertising). On top of that, in a new
media environment, it gets easier to answer many questions regarding the
effectiveness of an advert, and advertising money efforts turn to be accountable.
This means that the advertiser can better realise its expenditures and its revenues.
Furthermore, Internet advertising is often based in a content pull technology,
opposing to the push technology of traditional media. This means that, whenever a
banner is clicked or a web site is accessed, there is some users' pre-disposition.
This is a very important feature, since, in a sense, it is the user, and not the
advertiser, who decides when he wants to see such information.
Interactive Television Advertising
Interactive Television will make traditional television evolve to something
completely different, whose foundations (new media) are technology-driven. After
all, it is acceptable to think that the new solutions which are about to be brought to
the television advertising industry have been developed and are having its trial
period on the Internet. Besides, no one would dare disdain its capabilities and
above all its potential to generate viewers / users’ involvement, not only with the
media but also, and most importantly, with the product or brand, not discarding
group communities. It is also easy to envision some of the changes that the now
known television advert is about to undertake. Just consider what Internet has
done to traditional advertising only by breaking its physical barriers of time, space
and feedback, not to mention those of intermediaries and those of effectiveness
measuring.
Guidelines to Interactive Television Advertising
The first requirement is to focus on the vast capabilities that real-time feedback
enables and to redefine the use of video in the so-called media-mix.
Apparently the tendencies for the video advert are being grounded on a “on time
with the viewer” basis, opposing to that of “timed for the viewer”. Maybe, it is under
the second they ought to be grounded in an Interactive Television environment,
since the viewer has more power to decide when and for how long is the
advertiser going to have airtime, so users’ time is prime time!
This seems to indicate a changing in the shape of “our” well-known 30s advert, to
something more like an infomercial that the viewer requires whenever he / she
feels the need for. As such, the once highly paid prime time advertising becomes
viewer-available-time or, to be more precise, viewer requiring / demanding
information time. It is not about buying advertising space on the prime-time slots,
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nor it is about where, in the advertising pod, is the advert going to be placed. Not
that these two notions are part of the past of television, which they are not. The
fact is that, in the past, television was synonym of live-feed information, whereas,
in the future, it will tend to become an antonym of it, turning into something more
like downloadable feed of information – which actually, in real life terms, means
information available upon users demand. In other words: create the contents and
establish your business relationships today, so that the benefits appear very
strong tomorrow.
Apparently, Interactive Television is set to inverse last decades’ advertising
tendency (in placed adverts) of shorter lengths and increased frequency to
something like “when you want” frequency and “for as long as you want” length,
not forgetting the most important “what do you want” selection. Moreover, this
tendency will not only become noticed on the duration of the advert itself but also
on its shape.
We have already mentioned Seth Godin and Michael Schrage's ideas of
interrupting / intrusive commercial messages and how they do not fit onto a new
media advertising environment. The first argues that the future of marketing is all
about having the consumer’s permission to set down a communication process –
e. g. Amazon sends e-mails to its clients to inform them about the latest available
titles. In Is Advertising Dead?, Michael Schrage argues that the future adverts will
be down to three dominant shapes: invitational, solicited and integral. The first –
invitational (pointed earlier) – is already distinguished by some throughout banner
advertising on the Internet. In the case of ITV, the user gets some kind of invitation
to spare some of his / her time to watch a particular advert. Most likely the
advertiser is going to offer something in exchange, as we have argued already in
Internet advertising experiments. The second – solicited – can be found when a
user accesses a company’s web site, browsing for information or data on the
company’s products or services. We will analyse it further under Demanded
Advertising. The third – integral – we have already discussed under Product
Placement Television Advertising, which, as we will see further, will get a big
upgrade with the introduction of the ITV back channel. To a certain extent, the first
two categories will shift the already described “… imagery and Rock and Roll…”130
television advert to something more calm and direct, with less redundant and
much more specific / direct information. After all, by accepting the invitation or by
soliciting information, the user is already showing a pre-disposition to spare some
of his / her time with that specific company. It is down to that company and those
who responsible for its communication to make the users’ time worth, otherwise
that user will not be coming back.
130
Mathieson 1999 in O Marketing Personalizado e as Tecnologias de Informação (p. 77)
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The Economies behind Interactive Television
As we have seen along this report, there are many players in the advertising
industry: the client (also referred to in this report as advertiser), the advertising
agency, the media placement / buying companies and, obviously, the medium and
the video production. Moreover, in Interactive Television, there is also the
Interactive Television Service Provider (I.T.S.P.) who is responsible for the entire
expensive technological infrastructure and, obviously, the interactive contents
producers / companies.
Each one of these players undertakes a specific task in the advertising process,
from having a communication need to creating, delivering and measuring a
communication strategy. Clearly, all of them need, if not eager, to draw the
maximum revenue possible out of the process. But, on the end of the line, is the
consumer, who is very important on an advertising process. In the new media, it
seems that the consumer is the most important character – after all, it is on the
consumers’ joy that all the players’ efforts are or should be focused on. Basically, if
the audience does not convert itself in consumers, how can each of the players
pay the following player? Ultimately, if the advertiser does not get a favourable
Return of Investment (R.O.I.) from its advertising efforts, how can its business
subsist, and if there are no clients (advertisers), obviously there is no advertising
to be done. In a sense, all the players depend on each other’s subsidies to survive
and to ensure a workflow.
The I.T.S.P. might be the one with more investment on the upfront, but we must
bear in mind that all the others players should, if not have to, invest on its
collaborators’ new media capabilities and new media cultural education. So, on a
second analysis and bringing some points stressed out in this report, we can see
that interactive television advertising is not simply an adaptation of the advertising
models of television and Internet. Nor it is about adapting both media advert forms
to a new media. It is more like “Don’t Repackage – Redefine!”, the title of an article
from Barry Diller. In fact, the author argued in 1995 that each media talks his own
language and as such its contents should reflect it. Following his line of thought, I
would point that advertising messages, including its business models, ought to
follow the same guidelines.
Media Buying and Media Strategy / Planning for I -TV
Now that we have considered some changes that might take place on the way
television advertising is going to evolve once it is taken to an interactive
environment, it is time to envision some problems on the way it is going to be
bought and sold. Obviously, we can picture here a big mess regarding who is
going to get paid for what, as there are too many intervenients.
This is how the problems begin: put it this way, there are loads of channels being
broadcasted on ITV, each one has got its own programming. Each one of them is
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eager to find a way to make money out of something during its airtime. Even if
making money means broadcasting advertisers' programmes (bartering) for free.
Now the minute those programmes have the ability to shift the viewer’s attention
somewhere else – e. g. an advertisers’ web site – the TV channel is going to want
something in exchange from the advertiser. After all, the TV channel will be
loosing audience every time one viewer steps out of the broadcast to an
advertisers’ web site.
Then there is an I.T.S.P. that acts as a carrier for those channels and, therefore,
also delivers the adverts. Moreover, it is responsible for assuring a feedback
channel to the viewer / user on behalf of the advertiser, when the user decides to
move to a one-to-one dialogue with a particular advertiser. Obviously, the I.T.S.P.
is going to want to get paid by its crucial services.
Furthermore, there is the advertising agency that worked out some form of
displaying its clients’ message on a TV channel (Advert, etc.).
Besides, there are the media buying companies who obviously will want a piece of
the cake as well.
Then and very important, there is the advertiser who is not willing to pay more or
not willing to pay at all, unless there is some kind of pay-off – lets say a sale!
Tricky, isn’t it?
Business Models
Under the above described scenario, it appears appropriate to divide Interactive
Television advertising on two major categories: the first that relates to Web
Buying aspect of the media; and the second that relates to Video Buying.
The idea for this division is that there will be parts of the medium that will be, at
least in terms of concept, very alike to those of Internet (Web Buying). These parts
relate to choice menus, such as E.P.G. and the P.V.R., not forgetting some
programmes that will also run a web site in which the user can search for more
information regarding a specific topic. On the other hand, Video Buying relates
more to the traditional aspect of television advertising. Nevertheless, we should
bear in mind that the video is to have hyperlinkable features, restricting to this any
possible resemblances to the “old television”.
On top of these two major areas, there are another two: Specialized Content
Experts and Real Time Advertising Planning / Strategy & Buying. Those two
are much more related to the real breakthrough of interactivity on television, as we
will see. Having said that, it means also that we must still wait to put them to
practice.
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Web Buying
As we have seen, this relates to the Internet part of interactive television and can
be divided onto two different panoramas: the first – let us call it I.T.S.P. Content –
regards to the content made available by the Interactive Television Service
Provider I.T.S.P. (the equivalent to ISP but for ITV); the second – let us call it
Programme Content – relates to the interactive part of a specific programme.
I.T.S.P. Content
This regards to the possible choice menus made available by the I.T.S.P. The
more contents or menus the I.T.S.P. develops, the more chances it gets to have
ad space bought. This is obviously a very powerful part of ITV advertising, as it
relates, in a sense, to “a front door” or to the “hall of entrance” of the house.
Simply imagine how many people can be reached here – virtually 100% of the
users. We are talking about the E.P.G. and the P.V.R., which are clearly two of the
most wanted features of future television.
However, if, on one hand, one could think of it on a more generalist advertising
approach, one must not discard the fact that all the users are registered.
Therefore, despite the fact that it reaches everyone, it does it by reaching one-ata-time. As this advertising space can be so targeted, it can and should be mostly
used as a teaser, just like banner advertising is used on the Internet.
One last detail: the media selling here is done by the I.T.S.P. and clearly all that
we talked about in terms of targeting and evaluation for Internet also applies here.
Programme Content.
This relates to the content presented in the interactive part of the programme –
e.g. banners in the site of the programme, which can be very targeted since they
reflects mainly the “real” audience interest on the subject of the programme.
Banners’ targeting is based on the increasing depth of the users’ required
information. It seems perfect for documentaries and kids programmes.
Another hypothesis can be that of the site or some parts of it being of a sponsored
content kind, offered by an advertiser or group of advertisers, which for the
programme producers means a bonus, since they do not pay for nothing and still
have a new tool to get closer to their audience. The selling of ad space is made by
the TV programme producers and what they sell is space in their site. But again
the I.T.S.P. is going to want something.
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Video Buying
Video Buying relates to the video advertising capabilities we already know from
the old television advertising practices, although they will be enhanced by the
inherent technology of ITV. I think we can split the Video Buying onto two main
categories: Programme Buying and Advertising Buying.
Programme Buying
Content sponsorship, product placement and bartering are three practices we
have already covered under television advertising. Nevertheless, linking or deep
linking the programme to a company’s site can enhance all of them. How the link
is going to be charged is still to be defined, but one thing is sure: the programme
producers are going to want a piece of the cake as well.
Advertising Buying
As we have seen, this relates more to the traditional advertising part of interactive
television and can be divided onto two different panoramas: the first – let us call it
Live-Feed Advertising – is the television advertising we know nowadays (day
and night time based buying), though it will take into account the accurate number
of people watching a specific channel at a precise given time; the second – let us
call this option Demanded Advertising – is based on a viewer’s curiosity or
necessity, probably starting with a trip to the advertisers’ web site, in which more
information is asked, such as a video on a specific product. It is under this
panorama that some of the changes in television advertising are likely to became
more evident – e. g. Infomercials, interactive content advertising.
Live-Feed Advertising
In live television, maybe this applies strongly to sport or major news events. It is
live action, and people usually ache to see live events.
In programmed television, just because there is a big fuzz about Interactive
Television that doesn’t mean all “old” traditional television channels are dead.
Although tailor-made TV or even self-programmed TV might weaken pre-made
television, there are still many people for whom the interactive concept applied to
their television will not be worth a penny – e. g. elderly, sick people, hospitals. And
we must not forget that many people will not feel thrilled at all with the idea of
adopting a more active approach to the act of watching telly.
Having said that, it is evident that any user will have the option of bypassing the
ads, fact that can be seen as a drawback for the advertiser. But I think it is only a
drawback if we look at it on an old-fashioned television point of view of “having the
maximum possible reach”. If we look at it on another perspective, more up-to-date,
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there is the possibility of knowing precisely how many people watched a given
advert. That is very good news for the advertiser.
Another line of though is that of the growth of specific television channels that may
survive on an ordinary type of television advertising – just think of the amount of
specialised magazines available. And to sponsor them, there are loads of
advertisers willing to supply programmes so that the channel has broadcasting
content.
Another option is that of running a channel on already available and produced
content. There is a lot of television content on archive – e. g. Portugal’s SIC
GOLD, owned by one of the private networks (SIC) runs 24h over 24h of old
programming. So why not make the archives worth some profits? The
programmes are already paid. So what might come from advertising are strictly
profits.
As we have seen, all this kind of Live-Feed Advertising will follow a traditional
television advertising orientation. Nevertheless, we must not forget two factors: the
first is that it can be accounted for its real number of viewers, opposing to the
estimated number of old television; the second is that it can be also measured for
its effectiveness, which on an advertiser point of view is extraordinary.
In terms of media buying, we have once again the television channel, the I.T.S.P.
and maybe the programme producers (if it was not produced by the channel)
wanting to get paid, and again the advertiser wanting to pay upon results.
Demanded Advertising
Picture those late night telemarketing broadcastings and imagine that someone
asks for something like that (horrible vision of course)! Now imagine someone
asking a company to “enlighten” his / her knowledge of a particular product or
service. If someone is asking specialised information to a company, it means
interest or a need, both very important words about which we have talked under
Internet advertising. This is where advertisers can and should make the most of
the capabilities of the media, creating real interactive solutions to entertain and
inform their potential customers, and taking all the necessary time, users’ time, to
build a relationship of trust and need. This relationship requires the maximum
attention paid to the users. After all, the control is in their hands.
Specialised Content Experts
Imagine that you are a fishing enthusiast and you live in a certain remote region of
your country. You would like to know your local weather forecast for the next days,
true? Nothing new: regional television has been providing this kind of information
for years. But what they do not know is your hobbies.
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Interactive Television (channels, advertisers and I.T.S.P.) can know them, and so
after the weather forecast they can put on specific fishing adverts or shows
targeted solely at you. It can even go further in depth! In old television, some
adverts were re-adapted (e. g. Renault Clio MTV series). The advert built around
the famous James Brown song “GET –UP!!!” was originally produced in Argentina
and was broadcasted in two different versions. They were both the same, apart
from one of the last camera shots (that was inside the car where some friends
shook their heads to the James Brown tune) and the packshot. In the Portuguese
broadcasted version, the group of friends was not the same as in the UK version,
nor did the packshot used the road-rails as a vanishing point to the product’s
U.S.P. sentences. Instead, it used a black background with some graphics
resembling Vu’s meters. After all, the U.S.P. of that particular series was its “ExtraSound-System”.
It should not be impossible to envision adverts with more or less humour,
according to the viewers’ film preferences. After all, through data-mining it is
possible to know what kind of films a certain person usually watches. If it shows
that a good percentage are comedies, then it is just a question of broadcasting
that specific user the version of the advert with the funny gags. In principle, this is
quite targeted tailor-made advertising. Now imagine the concept taken further to
ITV programmes and shows, the so-called tailor-made TV. Impressive? Not that
much. After all, it is just a question of having a computer program (Software Agent)
analysing your daily television viewing data.
Now imagine that the same computer programme, by crossing the weather
forecasts in your region – for the area of the river where you usually fish and for an
area of another river 100 km away, near the football pitch where your kid’s team
will be playing – proposes you the following: you leave for fishing tomorrow
morning and buy the bait on a specific shop on the way; you go fishing and then
have lunch in a quiet restaurant next to the river falls (10 km off the place where
you fished), watch the game and come back. Quite a day’s programme!
Now imagine this applied to television content, something like your “very smart
video recorder” that knows your interests and is able to learn some new everyday.
After a while, it would be able to start pointing you interest related programmes
and new tendencies for your interests. I would call it a Specialized Content Expert,
which knows exactly what pleases its users in terms of content, and therefore
seeks to deliver them the most individually and appropriate contents.
Now picture the I.T.S.P. developing the service, maybe together with mobile
phone operators network, so that the consumers – upon permission – are advised
whenever the agent feels it is relevant to “bug” its owner. How many companies
would line up to sponsor such feature?
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Real-Time Advertising Planning / Strategy & Buying
The sentence itself is a paradox: how can one plan and draw strategies in real
time? Obviously if it is a planning with strategic outcomes, it cannot be done in
real-time! Nevertheless, lacking a better word combination and for the sake of the
arguments to be presented, let us stick to a simpler “Real-Time Advertisement”
R.T.A., now that we know what is being done "on the fly" behind the concept that
we are going to develop.
We have talked about Specialized Content Expert and its clever use of software
agents. Now imagine a further developed version of these agents working and
delivering to advertisers results in real time, whose reflections reach the
consumers. Let us say you are watching a live TV show with interviews, and that
one of the conversations leads to washing machines. By a word recognition
system or with an employee inserting key words in a computer, the I.T.S.P.
manages to deliver in real-time to a group of potential advertising partners the
topic of the conversation. Moreover, it can also provide the exact number of
viewers, so that the advertisers can measure their effective reach, which
represents the possibilities they have to establish one-to-one dialogues, otherwise
also seen as future potential consumers. The advertisers ask the I.T.S.P. to trigger
the broadcasting with a link to their site, and that is when you get some kind of
invitation from a washing machine producer to go and visit its site, where you can
find out more about its washing machines… These invitations would have to be
very simple – like a simple text overlaying the video – so that they could be on in
few seconds. The point is: if an invitation proper targeted is on at the right time,
maybe it can “push” some people into the site and give the advertisers a bit of time
with the consumer.
Let us say now that you are browsing the Web on your telly, looking for mobile
phones. Imagine that you get the same kind of message or a pop-up “self-close”
timed window, calling you to turn to television mode because on channel 507 there
are some guys chatting about mobiles, or that anything else warns you that the
advert for the new Nokia phone is going to be on in 5’s in channel 57.
Visibly on these two proposals there is the privacy issue, but this mode could be
turned ON or OFF by the user, which means that permission was granted or not.
Or imagine again some kind of reward for having the service ON, like a free film on
V.D.O. at your choice.
As it looks, Media Placement can almost be “Real Time” and practically free. The
open contact between the I.T.S.P. and advertiser partners is cheap (data-rate
phone call, if there is no existing open link). What represents some investment is
software development, but then again, as it is an evolution version of a software
agent, its costs are not exorbitant.
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Conclusions
Over these last pages, we have analysed the drawbacks of advertising in
television and the U.S.P of new media advertising, which has given us some
background to start drawing some ideas on ITV advertising shape and media
buying business models.
Some are, in my opinion, simple adaptations of television and Internet advertising
models to the media of ITV, and therefore they do not use fully all the capabilities
of the media. Nevertheless they do reflect, to a certain extent, how technology
changed the original form, shape and placement of the advert.
But as we have seen in the previous parts of this report, there is still a great deal
of unknown features in this new way of using television. As we concluded, such
“upgrade” in the device of television will need time for “upgrading” the once
“viewers” to “users”. After all, new communicating relations and ways of behaving
are going to be asked from our audiences, ultimately our consumers.
These new relations and behaviours are argued to be of a one-to-one basis and, if
that is true, then the industry and the consumers should build them together, step
by step, respecting each others' timing. This concerns all players in the industry,
from clients to I.T.S.P.s not leaving asides advertising agencies and TV Channels.
After all, it will be on their whole working that the Interactive Television Services
will find its breakthroughs to fulfil the users’ needs and requests. Otherwise, one
can envision that another dot.com history will be written, its original varying only
with the media used.
In my opinion, investment is a key word for all the players involved – obviously
each one of them will be investing in specific areas. As such, this makes them
partners whether they like it or not. If this comes to be true, then it appears
reasonable to think that the advertising revenues should be reverting to each one
of them – even if there is a big disparity on the investments made. After all, each
individual player needs the rest of the players.
This can also be strengthened by the change on the way ads were paid for in the
beginning of Internet advertising. This change happened due to the technological
developments, which turned advertising effectiveness accountable. This
characteristic can also be stressed further with the client / advertising agency
relationship, which has evolved, and still is, to a so-called “pay for results”,
otherwise known as “pay by performance”.
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Further Readings
Books
CÁDIMA F. R. (1999) DESAFIO DOS NOVOS MEDIA a nova ordem politica e
comunicacional, Lisboa, Editorial Noticias.
CORREIA C. (1998) TELEVISÃO INTERACTIVA a convergência dos media,
Lisboa, Editorial Noticias.
LEWIS, H.G., NELSON C. (1998) Handbook of Advertising, Lincolnwood
(Chicago), NTC Publishing Group.
POPPER K., CONDRY J. (1995) Televisão: Um perigo para a democracia, Lisboa,
Gradiva - Publicações.
(1994) ORIGINAL- La télévison: un danger pour la démocratie
SANTOS J. A. (2000) HOMO ZAPPIENS o feitiço da televisão, Lisboa, Editorial
Noticias.
SARTORI G. (2000) Homo Videns - Televisão e Pós-Pensamento, Lisboa,
TERRAMAR - Editores, Distribuidores Livreiros.
(1997) ORIGINAL- Homo Videns - Televisione e post-pensiero
TRAQUINA N. (1997) BIG SHOW MEDIA - Viagem pelo mundo audiovisual
português, Lisboa, Editorial Noticias.
WHITAKER J. (2001) INTERACTIVE TELEVISION DEMISTIFIED, United States
Of America, McGraw-Hill
WOLTON D. (1997) PENSAR A COMUNICAÇÃO, Lisboa, Difel 82- Difusão
Editorial.
(1997) ORIGINAL- Penser la Communication
WOLTON D. (1999) E DEPOIS DA INTERNET?, Lisboa, Difel 82- Difusão
Editorial. (1999) ORIGINAL- Internet et après?
ZEFF R., ARONSON B. (2000) PUBLICIDADE NA INTERNET, Rio de Janeiro,
Editora Campus.
(1999)ORIGINAL- Advertising on the Internet
Web Sites
BBC - www.bbc.co.uk
Datamonitor - www.datamonitor.com
DB (Database Marketing)- www.db-marketing.com
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European Master in Multimedia and Audiovisual Business Administration – Pedro Motta da Silva
October 2001
Dynamic Logic- www.dynamiclogic.com
ITVT (Interactive Television Today) www.itvt.com
Mad (Online community for the marketing, media,advertising and design industry)www.mad.co.uk
Newmediazero (online
www.newmediazero.com
presence
of
the
new
media
age
group)-
Salon (Technologies Online)- www.salon.com
TRP (Television Research Partnership)- www.trponline.co.uk
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