MIXX Canada: The Ever Changing Innovative, Optimized and Animated Display Ad

While Techvibes reported that the IAB recently released a report that mobile advertising was growing four times faster than online advertising, I had a chance to take in the conference they ran in conjunction with the report, MIXX Canada.

Terence Kawaja, the CEO of Luma Partners, perhaps best known for his Mad Avenue Blues video that has garnered over 170,000 YouTube views said that advertising was at a critical inflection point. 

He made the interesting point that rather than fragmentation being the problem, it was rather duplication as intermediaries lease and buy advertising products from a plethora of service providers.

An increasing number of solutions online are geared towards bypassing intermediaries- allowing for corporate and consumer marketers to believe that they no longer need the intermediary, but usually these solutions are geared towards filling one aspect of the marketing mix when the reality is that most marketers need a diversified media plan in place to best dynamically reach the target market. 

Kawaja said that perhaps advertising needed an operating system.

If an advertising operating system was built, we could see the disintermediation of agencies on a less fragmented scale. 

The IAB Portrait Ad Unit uses biometric braclets and facial coding to create more targeted display ads. AOL says in research that the new portrait ads attract attention 35% faster, 81% more often and 95% longer while generating 81% less negative emotions, increased interaction rates by 4.5x to 7x, and made users 263% more likely to buy the product advertised.

Another example of a mini-advertising operating system is display advertising that includes e-commerce within the ad as consumers are trained not to click through as AOL announced an upgrade to Project Devil last week. An HTML5 overlay allows for users to expand the display ad box rather than click thru.

With more display ad optimization tools, the consumer interaction time is much higher as marketers can also turn to display video advertising. That can be done through Microsoft's IAB filmstrip which uses ad squencing and contextual mapping to deliver ads in five different locations, or five different phases of the purchase funnel, if you will. Microsoft calls these stages of the purchase funnel brand awareness, interest, desire, intent and loyalty.

However, YouTube has seen a rise of 3D augmented reality usage, bringing another element into play. Eileen Naughton, the Managing Director of Digital Media Strategy at Google for the Americas said that the NBA Ball of Fame All-Star Game advertisements which included talking 3D basketballs had a 3.9x better benchmark rate for interaction, proving that augmented reality can be a dynamite advertising weapon. She continued in saying that YouTube allows for slight, sound, motion and interactivity.

As for the e-commerce side, latter examples such as Project Devil are collapsing what Kawaja called the traditional purchase funnel, where in another highlighted example, manufacturers such as Toshiba are experimenting with dropshipping where they bypass the retailers entirely. 

While Kawaja refers to the latter as a collapse of the purchase funnel in e-commerce and m-commerce which eliminates intermediaries, the biggest question that remains pertains to the amount of data currently available for marketers to utilize and whether that's just too large of a privacy concern to consumers in general. 

He referred to the marketing an advertising world as one that was switching from Mad Men to Math Men, and while I've seen Microsoft predict the same sort of thing, privacy regulation on the amount of data that marketers can utilize may put a damper on the latter prediction. 

Regardless, Kawaja closed in saying that there is no substitute for good creative ideas. 

That and what I would amount to of the continued leadership of left-brain thinkers like Kawaja that discuss ideas and present them in ways that make sense in a rapidly changing advertising world; for Eleanor Roosevelt once said: "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people". 

The latter concepts showcase some different ideas you can go about your advertising while being mindful that this was an IAB event and there were major players involved. These ideas are ones that do seem to continue to bypass the traditional agency route if display advertising does indeed increase tenfold as Kawaja predicts and there are some very innovative concepts- but I believe there are plenty more disruptive advertising models to come. As we often discuss, mobility continues to take off and advertising companies will continue to think outside of the box beyond display advertising where "interaction rates" are becoming quickly more important than "click thru rates". Still, display ads seem resurgent and are determined to still be a powerful part of the digital and mobile marketing mix.