“Advertising has become like the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report, that's not just the future any longer,” says Ben Fox, executive vice president at Adconion Media Group. “Smart TVs being shipped today have that kind of functionality now and advertisers need to become more comfortable with that environment.”
In a recent discussion with The Drum, Fox explained how advertising in 2013 will continue to evolve beyond “being locked into a 30 second TV slot” and how advertisers should embrace the “opportunity to stay with consumers in multiple environments, within the home and out of home”.
One such example of these new forms of advertising is Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE NUads offering which posted a 37 per cent engagement rate with audiences since its launch in autumn 2012. NUads allow viewers to interact and vote with ads giving brands immediate consumer feedback and engagement.
As well as being more engaging to a consumer Fox believes that technological advances have also opened the door for agencies to produce more dynamic and responsive creatives, “digital allows you to immediately push a campaign into the market, understand the effectiveness, understand how the audience is responding to it, and within a few days make adjustments to the creative, to the media buy, to how what kind of audience is actually responding to it,” says Fox.
According to Fox smart TVs and social media are the ones to watch in 2013, so much so that Adconion has entered into a partnership with smart TV inventory provider Smartclip and LG to “include smart TV into Adconion’s integrated platform” allowing advertisers to “run campaigns across all media from one single platform”.
Fox adds that social media will move beyond “collecting a bunch of fans” and will become “a key part of most brand’s advertising strategies”.
When asked if the range of technology available has made life more difficult for marketers Fox explains that though advertising will never be like it was “in the 1970s when 70 million people tuned into one show” today’s world is more interesting than it ever has been.
For Adconion the benefits of technology lie with advertisers “demanding more and more insight into their campaigns. There are so many more vectors available for analysis than traditional advertising previously offered”.
According to Fox one of the main challenges for advertisers moving away from traditional advertising will be choosing the most effective platforms, concluding “The reality is the audience is now bouncing between the TV, a smartphone, a laptop and an iPad, and even though it might be more challenging making ads more interactive and more personalised will be beneficial for both advertisers and brands”.