I remember when as a child, commercial breaks were the moment when my siblings and I would jump up from the sofa and make a dash to the bathroom in order not to miss one second of our beloved television show. Over the years, television commercials grew in length from taking up 13% of the airtime in 1952 to 32% in 2018 which means that the whole family can easily find time for their bathroom break. Well, that is if people even use the television at all given that television ownership in North America is declining and internationally, only 23% of viewers prefer watching television programs on a TV set.
Advertisements, however, have not entirely disappeared and have shifted in their presentation. For instance, Roku, a television streaming company where Heineken sponsored ads in the online presentation of the CBS show “Billions.” In this way, users of Roku could unlock the viewer content to continue watching the show where television users would be given the usual menu of a series of commercial breaks. Hulu is going about things slightly differently using “pause ads” which activates when users pause a video. The ad is not another short film but is a translucent banner on the side of the user screen which makes it attractive both to advertisers and viewers: users don’t feel overwhelmed by more active images and narratives to follow and advertisers are assured that users will not tune out after a few seconds. And this is where marketing has gotten more difficult since more and more consumers turn to streaming in large part to avoid the glut of television advertisements.
So, has online advertising actually changed the density of commercials? Or, has advertising been streamlined to accommodate viewers who feel overwhelmed by the overabundance of media messages?
Let’s scroll back to pop-up ads, the literal eyesore at the turn of the millennium. In 2014, Ethan Zuckerman, one of the inventors of pop-up advertising, profusely apologized in The Atlantic for this invention claiming that he “didn't realize what he was bringing into the world when he wrote the code for the first pop-up ad more than 20 years ago.” If anything, the pop-up advertising was the virtual learning moment for “less is more” as Zuckerman elaborates on the weakness of relying on revenue from advertising and the dangers of surveillance advertising. Zuckerman proposes a new model for funding media that won’t alienate viewers or disappoint advertisers. But does this mean that advertising will be a thing of the past?
Luckily, pop-ups died their necessary death and advertisers learned not to alienate their base with such visually offensive gimmicks. Tearing a page out of Understanding Media (1994), advertisers ran with “the media is the message” where Marshall McLuhan elaborates how medium informs the message, stating “Indeed, it is only too typical that the “content” of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.” It is not that hammering content as people will result in more, but can easily turn media into an ineffective vehicle for communication. This is where online advertising has had to become savvy in how it approaches consumers—and this applies throughout all forms of web advertising, and not just that of streaming television shows.
With the creation of engaging ads in multiple formats, there is the possibility of targeting people who actually need your product. Using esthetically pleasing visuals similarly can cut across language barriers which result in users addressing web advertisements through the visceral. Veronica Smith notes in her study on advertising, that TV and magazine advertising often relies “exclusively on the power of the visual to evoke an emotional response. Many of the visuals are unrelated to the product but operate on a subconscious level.” However, Smith notes a quite distinct situation with the web: “The marketing strategy shifts away from mass media to more direct contact with consumers.”
The visual becomes even more important than previously imagined when approaching web advertising given the smaller frames and challenges of keeping users engaged. Photomochi, founded by Christopher C. Lee, is one such agency that deals with the impact of how visual media today can quickly and succinctly capture an entire message within a single frame or a short film. While Jean-Luc Godard in the 1980s pronounced that cinema is dead, what has become clear in this millennium is that messages are less auteur-driven than before, but that media messages are transcending earlier media language.
In a seemingly paradoxical move, what online advertisement needs to succeed at is in getting us, the consumer, to want to skip that bathroom break altogether while making us look forward to the next advertisement. Even Hulu has given viewers the choice of which advertisement to watch and more recently it is has announced plans to create different types of advertisements for binge watchers.
From the Clio Awards which have since 1959 recognized innovation and creative excellence in advertising, design and communication, we are witnessing a renaissance of advertising as content focusses on artistry (form) over message in the hope that the latter will be transmitted by virtue of enjoyment. With more artists and advertising agencies rising to meet the challenges of a web-oriented consumer base that has ad blockers on their browsers and which is suspicious of AI-based targeted advertising, advertising today is a graceful dance of enticing internet users to watch a sixty second video while convincing advertisers that unless they make interesting content that consumers will want to watch, more toilet breaks will be in order.
