Ad Tech

Though it may not be immediately obvious, marketing and advertising are a service. How many times have we learned about a new way to solve a problem, a product we were delighted to discover, or a bargain available because it was on the radio, in a newspaper or magazine, or on a billboard?

And another in-plain-sight truth: marketing has always interacted, and taken advantage of, the latest technology. While early on people literally did walk the streets and talk about a product, with the advent of print came not only tracts and textbooks but advertising.

And in a major way, marketing continues to enjoy its life in print. Periodicals, newspapers, billboards (if such massive displays can be considered “print”), flyers and cards have been for a long, long time, a means of sharing information, sales, new products and services. And print has the advantage of automatically being tied to its most immediate audience: if you pick up a local paper, you’ll find ads for nearby services, products, sales, and businesses; if you pick up a business magazine you can expect ads for office furniture and supplies along with articles; in a kid’s magazine, you’ll find toys and child-friendly destinations advertised. Print is, and will remain, a particularly good source of local information.

With broadcast came a new means of sharing the story of a product or business with listeners and viewers. Ads were featured on radio and TV at the quarter hours, and in between shows. Companies often “sponsored” a show or series, and were associated with it. Go back to the old movie theaters, and you’ll find ads inserted into the pre-show reel – including the famous popcorn concession ads.

Over time, television and radio both began to face significant new hurdles. Once simply the only option for “home entertainment” other than a book or a game, cable and then podcasts, and finally streaming services offered not only enormous amounts of programming, but had to be learned by a public that picked up new technology in scattered ways, and rendered ads much more difficult to target.

Initially, cable was a mixed bag when it came to advertising. Premium services, like HBO, were generally ad-free, while broadcast services, though offered via cable, continued to feature ads. Radio continued on unabated, but it was quite a while back that podcasts and audio books began to offer a traveler option for listening while driving. Now a subscriber to something like SiriusFM can get radio channels – complete with advertising, but uninterrupted though satellite service. Listeners don’t have to fiddle with a dial to enjoy radio and the audio portion of a TV show.

On the home computer front, the Internet had arrived. Early on, advertising on The Web really wasn’t a “thing.” At least, not until people began to spend a lot of their time online, and a “home page” (remember those?) could attract a significant audience.

Marketers realized that ad space on a highly trafficked page had some value – and if all it took to “raise your hand” was to click on an enticing ad, it was a pretty simple way to demonstrate to a client that their marketing campaign was working – especially as compared to the old idea of “eyeballs.” The focus was on audience share for a TV or radio program, so it was a potential viewer of your ad placement, as opposed to both the potential (how much traffic a website got) plus actual (how many clicks were generated).

As websites became more and more sophisticated, studies were undertaken to discover where the “hot spots” were on a web page. These determined how much to charge for a spot on your site. People actually had eye trackers put on their eyes, and then they looked at websites. The studies then followed their eye movements as the subject looked around the site. It was a combination of natural inclination, mostly formed due to learning to read – so for most American and European languages, learning to read left to right, top to bottom of a page. And it was somewhat due to bright shiny objects, flashing icons, videos, or a menu of options on a page. Either way, cost for space was determined by where most people spent most time on a page, so an advertiser would buy space on the top banner, side tower, bottom banner, or inserts, for example.

Information architecture undertook the study of how to cue people to what was available on a web page and website – where they should look for menus, what kind of feedback to give them about how to move around, save something, share something. We worried a lot about the changing screen size, colors that stood out or receded, sounds, clarity and how many words should be in a line of text for readability. And web designers became more and more sophisticated about how to place information on a page, making it easy for people to “navigate,” and determining how to price “real estate” on the page for advertisers.

And then smartphones changed the landscape as more and more we used these smaller devices to interact with the Internet.

Through it all, advertisers tried to keep pace with their audiences – wanting to offer products, services, and offers in the best way possible to maximize their spend and effort.

Another hitch in the advertising conundrum was that the Internet wasn’t the only way in which advances in technology were changing the way advertisers had to approach their audiences.

Platforms like YouTube were offering video podcasts, and content creators were programming a daily show, shorts, interviews – and eventually spinning off into networks with an entire staff of personalities and reporters. Shows included cooking, fashion, politics, and just about anything people found interesting. YouTube would interrupt content with ads, and eventually really popular creators not only made money by generating viewers on the platform, but got direct support from advertisers for whom the popular personalities would read ads during their show. Easy to hit “skip” after a few seconds of an ad, not so easy to scrub forward to where you guessed an ad read might end, or if the program was being listened to live, you’d simply have to listen to the read. And, as we were happy to do in the old broadcast days of TV, most listeners figured a free hour or so of entertainment was worth a few minutes of advertising – especially when the ad itself was a form of entertainment, or was offering some information about a particular product or service as described by a favorite personality or expert.

And something happened with streaming services not so long ago. First, new services came online that offered free streamed content – movies, TV shows, specialty programming – but, as if back to the old days, with commercials. Then, premium (subscribed to) services like Netflix and Prime, which had long since begun making their own series and movies, began offering programming with limited commercials. They might have a few commercials at the start of a movie, or at a few specific spots in the program.

Perhaps, if you’ve read along this far, you can see what once was a matter of buying the best slot on a very popular weekly show, or the nightly news, or a particularly popular online destination, and then tailoring your ad to the desired customer, then for a while became more challenging as listeners’ and viewers’ choices multiplied, and the services themselves were charging customers directly for their product.

It wasn’t so very many years ago when the Super Bowl presented viewers with two forms of entertainment: the game itself, and, believe it or not, the ads. We viewers looked forward to the Super Bowl ads not quite as much as the game, but it was definitely part of the entertainment. And then there are the holiday ads – I still go out of my way to see the UK “Christmas adverts,” for John Lewis, Sainsbury’s and IRN BRU. Many people still remember Mr. Whipple, Tony the Tiger, or Mr. Clean, or can sing the jingle to the Pepsodent commercial.

As our technologies continue to speed ahead, the interest in new products and services, businesses and locations, styles and trends, will be there. An advertiser’s work is to keep the story as fresh as possible.