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For marketers, it’s the best of times and the worst of times. On the one hand, the world has never been more complex and their audience more fragmented. On the other, there has never been more resources for creative storytelling. This unique tension is animating the evolution of the entire industry.
“What you say in advertising is more important than how you say it.” - David Ogilvy
Next week is Advertising Week. The annual New York City event will draw tens of thousands of marketers from all around the world, all of whom will be eager to make new connections, compare notes, and discuss the changes happening across their industry.
Perhaps no topic will loom as large as the rise of adblockers - applications that modify web or mobile experiences to filter out advertisements.
In some places, the technology has been reasonably mainstream for a while. In the UK for example, an IAB study found that 1 in 7 people uses some form of blocking. In the US, consumer adoption has been slower. As a result, brands and agencies have been largely able to ignore the threat -- or at least, to leave it in the realm of the theoretical.
With the release of iOS 9 last week, that theoretical problem became very real. For the first time, adblockers were allowed on the iPhone. Within a day, 3 of the top 10 paid apps were blockers, and a week later, one of them remains at #1.
This is a problem for everyone in the industry. For app developers and startups, it means thinking differently about business model. For advertisers, it is worse. AdAge recently published a piece called “Yes, There Is A War On Advertising. Now What?” Last year, digital guru Ethan Zuckerman published a 5,000-word missive in The Atlantic arguing that advertising was “The Internet’s Original Sin.”
The point of these types of articles is the same: the scale, targeting, and aggressiveness of display ads has actual provoked an adversarial, antagonistic relationship between advertisers and the consumers with whom they’re trying to build awareness and affinity.
Of course, many have offered alternatives. While adblockers may have only just come to the fore, consumer dissatisfaction with display, pre-roll video, and the other types of mainstream digital advertising has been recognized for some time. From sponsored content to real world rewards to native, companies have been experimenting with different formats trying to give consumers something of value rather than interrupting other experiences.
For one company in the thick of the industry’s transformation, the answer is even simpler: to keep consumer attention, advertisers need to tell great stories.
What makes this answer notable is its source. It comes not from a creative agency, but from an adtech startup whose business model is driven by data and programmatic placement.
Virool is a platform to help video content get more views. The way it works is a video creator logs in, indicates the budget they have (starting at just $25), the audience they’re trying to target, and the action they’re trying to maximize, such as getting the most views or optimizing for people sharing on social media. Virool then programmatically places videos on the sites of a network of more than 100,000 publishers.
At the beginning, the company was, like so many adtech companies, just focused on using massive amounts of data to better automate targeting. In the four years since it launched, however, it has increasingly recognized that the real heart of virality in video is about storytelling and the emotions that videos can inspire. Far from automating creativity away, the company now says its mission is to “make advertising more human.”
For Virool, this emphasis on story and emotion is more than just lip service. The company has actually built emotional understanding into their product in the form of eIQ, a technology that when users opt in, allows Virool to watch their reactions to videos in real time using the computer’s camera. The tool tracks 10,000 points on a person’s face and scores them for different emotional reactions. It can even determine changes in heart rate based on factors like how close a person is to the screen. Using this technology, Virool can help content creators better understand how to inspire the emotions in their intended audiences.
eIQ is an amazing example of how technology can be used to amplify the power of story. It’s also one piece of evidence that, while the ad units of the first era of digital may be bucking under the weight of consumer antagonism, there has actually never been a better time to tell stories - which was the original point of advertising after all.
So, what makes today such a golden age for storytelling?
The rise of digital video
Video was the original multimedia, the best “happy wedding of words and images” to use a phrase from industry legend Leo Burnett. In the TV era, video was constrained by the cost of airtime to 15, 30, and sometimes 60 second formats. In the digital age, video has no such constraints. It is allowed to entertain for as long as it entertains. Its job of keeping consumer attention is judged in the most pure way: how long they watch before they look away.
Next week on an AdWeek panel on emotion in advertising, Virool will announce the winner to a year long campaign to determine the best online advertising video of the year. The 10 finalists average between 2 and 4 minutes, with the longest topping out at nearly 5 minutes. What matters isn’t their length, it’s the quality of their narrative.
What’s remarkable is that digital video is just getting started. Increased mobile bandwidth plus dramatically better video quality on phones and consumer DSLR cameras mean more video than ever is being created and watched. To put it more dramatically, both Facebook and Snapchat now see more than 4 billion video views per day. Buzzfeed alone saw more than 1 billion video views on Facebook alone (and 1.8 billion total) in August. And that’s just one publisher.
Serialization
On the one hand, the plethora of available content has compressed our attention spans and reduced the standard units of content consumption we like. At the same time, it has done nothing to lessen our voraciousness for stories and narratives that extend and grow over time. Enter serialization.
Serialization refers to content that tells a complex story, one small unit at a time. In the digital age, it’s not just for TV. One of the most interesting examples can be found in Wattpad, the biggest social network that most people don’t know about yet.
Wattpad is a community of 40 million+ that spend a collective 11 billion minutes per month reading and writing stories. Rather than complete books, stories are released a chapter at a time. Readers become invested and can comment and share what parts of the story grabbed them and what they hope happens to the characters. In many cases, this actually influences the writer's, meaning that all of a sudden storytelling isn’t a solo act but a collaborative group experience. Many of the top series on Wattpad have been read billions of times, turned into best selling novels, and optioned for TV and movies.
The democratization of creation
Perhaps most powerful of all is that the tools for telling stories have never been more evenly distributed. Some of the most in-demand partners for advertisers aren’t the traditional agencies, but social media influencers who became amazing telling stories in whatever medium they chose - be it Vine or Snapchat or Youtube or something else. The writers whose stories rise to the top of Wattpad aren’t professionals; they are just people who all of a sudden had a platform, and found that people responded.
This cannot help but change how brands and agencies think about advertising. David Jones, former Havas global CEO and founder of the much-buzzed new brandtech firm You & Mr. Jones referred to this phenomenon when he said the industry now had access to “a global creative department of more than 1 billion people.”
Does the new digital era bring challenges for advertisers? Absolutely.
Yet at the same time, for those who can block out the noise and pressure for just a moment, there is something incredible happening, as well.
Long before programmatic buying and adblockers, Leo Burnett wrote:
“The work of an advertising agency is warmly and immediately human. It deals with human needs, wants, dreams and hopes. Its 'product' cannot be turned out on an assembly line.”
The lesson is that the heart of advertising lies not in display units or fullscreen takeovers, but in stories that make people laugh, cry, and feel connected to something bigger.
The brands that recognize this fundamental fact and who view the new platforms as an amazing, evolving creative canvass will be those that thrive.
