Jon Gibs, Vice President, Media Analytics at Nielsen is offering up a 16-page report on “Integrated Measurement in a Multi-Screen World.”
Gibs asks: If the Internet has truly “arrived” and is being taken seriously, why have we not yet seen significant brand advertising dollars follow? He then follows the question with this sage piece of thinking: “Perhaps it’s because online creative units tend to replicate the print experience instead of redefining the consumer experience.”
Gibs also suggests that digital specialists acquire a more expansive view (although seeing the whole pie doesn’t prevent a slice from being stale):
To continue growing, the online ad world must take a hard look at itself as part of a broader, media industry-wide context and, as one prominent TV client put to me, “grow up.” The Internet does not exist in a vacuum and we’ve moved past the days when it is practical to operate like it does. Leading marketers look at media from a holistic perspective to reach today’s increasingly connected consumers. So too must anyone participating in the ad industry.
A TV guy telling digital kids to grow up is kind of rich. It seems to me that a lot of money’s being made online by acting like a kid–Twitter, Facebook, iTunes, even Google is the result of, and home for, kid-like tendencies. So maybe that’s it. Maybe online advertisers need to act more like kids, not grumpy old media guys. What might that mean in practical terms? It means playing around, and making a mess while discovering and inventing.
Right now, people are working on inventing a better Web banner. But why settle for a bigger better banner, when the task requires pushing past banners altogether?
Ultimately the Web and Mobile is about people talking to people, not DJs talking to people, or reporters and editors talking to people, or actors talking to people. Given this, the ad model needs to come from a place of people talking to people. Real time, global word-of-mouth is what the digital medium offers. Let’s work with that, not an ad model from another era.
