Benjablog (2)

A Million Little TV Spots

When I hear that the ad agencies and ad networks are starting to play nice together, I’m struck by the fact that the conversation keeps focusing on how large media clients are going to better utilize the new technologies afforded to them by microtargeting, mass personalization, and segmentation.

It’s as though, having shown up for a rugby match dressed for badminton, Publicis and WPP have decided to put on a brave face and hope for the best.

There has been, is now and will always be a place for broad campaigns aimed at driving brand awareness, and herding a large group of people towards satisfying the desires of a single, huge, business.

But there is a larger need for a mechanism that allows a hundred million small enterprises to market their goods, services and themselves to a similarly small and scattered audience - and audience measured in dozens or hundreds, not millions.

The big agencies continue to try and figure out how to play the “new” media by the old rules. They ask, “how can I build a viral campaign that spreads my message far and wide?” “How can I use social media to get people to talk about how much they love my brand?”

For decades, global business - brands and the companies that support them - have lurched towards ever greater conglomeration, going for scale and scope.

But the digital advertising landscape is built for a different kind of scope: it is engineered for point-to-point communication which, although usable in a large broadcast model, isn’t optimized for one-way message delivery. Why do brand managers and their agency partners fret over how to handle negative feedback online? Why do they try to fine-tune their placements so that video overlay ads show up only on content they deem “brand-appropriate?” Why do they struggle with content- and keyword-targeted campaigns, throwing armloads full of cash at a medium where the best results are achieved not with a broad-based “messaging” campaign, but with a hundred thousand individual conversations.

Why are WPP, Publicis and now Google and Microsoft working together to develop new ad formats for digital media?

What happens when Unilever’s ads for Dove soap get elbowed out of their “prime” advertising space by 1,000 artisans selling hand-made goat-milk soap, who join together in a loose social group and collectively purchase $20 million worth of in-video ads on YouTube?

Who’s going to knit that group together? Who’s going to provide them with the technology and creative backing to develop that campaign? Who’s going to place it, bid for the space, monitor and fine-tune performance?

Does the world inexorably move towards larger and larger enterprises selling more and more of the same stuff to everyone, or is there a point at which smaller becomes better?