Some days I just want to be anti-social. I want to sit in front of the TV and not have to phone in to register an opinion. I want to browse the web without entering a Poll or signing up to newsletters. And some days I want to read a magazine the “old fashioned” way – and not rip out a page just to flash it in front of my webcam in order to access some special content.
Actually… scratch that. MOST days I want all that.
There’s a trend at the moment to be interactive with all your communication. These days everything seems such an effort. In this trend, ads are a two-way process. Conversations are social. It’s not sufficient to entertain or inform, “interactive” is so much better. And by interactive we don’t mean in the way we all identified with and talked about the Oxo family or the would-be lovers of Nescafe. We don’t mean interactive in the way the best Tango ads had us imitating the advertising and talking about the drink as we would talk about our day. No, the new interactive, in its guise as a trend, is different.
This form of interactive is online focussed and driven by the almost monthly leaps in technology, specifically where it relates to bandwidth. As advertisers we can deliver “rich media” for the best in interactive advertising. Engage your audience to get rollovers and clickthroughs, we are encouraged. As though these are the ultimate goal and not merely one more form of assessment. As though these are the only way in which in inform the purchase decision
And so we are encouraged to believe in and pepetuate the split between traditional and new. And new is always better. Because when TV was new, radio and print died. Didn’t they?
So traditional is relegated and even print must tow the party line by directing us towards the Internet and the rich media experience that awaits us there. And there, the latest in “user experience” awaits us. Much like the days of children’s Saturday morning television and its brief obsession with screeching 8 bit video games into our carefully positioned tape recorders, this user experience will take an age to load and deliver very little information via a beautifully crafted technology demo.
And so we come to the latest in trends, the proof that print advertising can be made to gel with the green grass of online life. Augmented Reality, or virtual reality to those still awe-stuck in the 80s and 90s. If ever there was a modern example of misused technology it is AR. In the field of advertising it is akin to asking the consumer to dance for the supper they already paid for. In the rush to deliver rich experiences and engage the consumer, the advertiser has neglected to question the amount of hoops that must be jumped through in order to reach the experience. Queue here to be sold to, the sign seems to say. Our brochure is in 3D.
Print is flat. TV is flat. Billboards? Flat. The creative effort required to make people linger for five seconds in order to be entertained and informed is too much. How can a person get excited without interacting? If only reading were interactive.
If you want to make ads interactive, don’t do it for the technology, do it for the idea.
