In this week’s New York Time’s Magazine (The “Screens Issue”), a roundtable with 3 new media heavy hitters—(from left) Robert Rasmussen (R/GA), Lars Bastholm (AKQA), and Benjamin Palmer (Barbarian Group)—called “Multiscreen Madmen” looked at the changing nature of advertising in our 4-screen world.
Rather than attempt to summarize the long, long article (there must have been coffee on the roundtable), we’ve pulled some key themes and good quotage from the conversation:
Multiplying Screens
Benjamin Palmer: What the proliferation of screens has done is give a bazillion creators the power to publish. There are now billions of hours of content, which means new places for advertisers to latch on to — lots of content that pockets of people find interesting. But the shift you’re describing makes things more complicated for advertisers too…
Robert Rasmussen: …Brands have become transparent, and that’s changed the tone of advertising. Now you have to try to be more authentic — even if it’s just authentically acknowledging that what you’re doing is advertising.
Bastholm: Most media, like television, used to be a kind of flow. You’d sit down, you’d turn it on and you’d watch. The reason advertising is completely broken is that the flow doesn’t exist anymore. …
Rasmussen: So advertising is by necessity a fractured narrative. We have a story we want to tell, and we use different media channels and different touch points to tell it. We have to rely on the consumer to pull the story together.
Fracturing the Narrative
Palmer: … [Even before the Internet] we needed to be able to tell a story that could exist in fragments, and no matter which fragments people saw and in what order they assembled them together in their head, it still added up to the same message. Now that’s happening with content, too…
Rasmussen:… Remember “Star Wars”? The bigger narrative was about the way people involved “Star Wars” in their lives: the T-shirts, all the talk about it, the fan fiction, the nicknames, the dialogue people quoted. People were willing to brand themselves with all these other elements that were outside the movie experience.
Bastholm: In those days, though, there was usually more of a brand monologue… That process became too transparent. Now our job is to have a conversation with your consumers about whatever story it is you want to tell about the brand.
Whither Superbowl Ads
Palmer: A Super Bowl ad is broadcast and everybody sees the same ad, and it comes from a single source. And so you may have a preference as to whether you liked this ad in comparison to this other ad in the block of ads that you just saw. But when you feel like you’ve discovered something on the Internet, it’s a different relationship to the brand.
The Death of Advertising?
Rasmussen: I’ve heard that said before, that some of these big advertising agencies are managing their own demise… I think what we are saying is we’re being adaptive to the way consumers take in and interact with brands. And is that advertising or is it marketing or is it participation? Those lines are getting blurry.
Bastholm: At my company, we’re starting to redefine ourselves from being an ad agency to being an entertainment and technology company. Because that’s basically what we do; we deliver branded entertainment of various sorts through a number of different technological channels.
Rasmussen: Clients are not saying, “Make us ads” or “Make us Web sites,” they’re saying, “Create interaction between our brand and our customers.” That’s our job now.
