Interactive Advertising … 6 Remarkable Secrets to Improve Effectiveness
It’s not what advertising does with the consumer. It’s what the consumer does with advertising. And the best advertising creates great consumer engagement with these interactive advertising secrets. Have you given these interactive advertising secrets a try?
Especially in this day and age of internet marketing, they are yielding very surprising results.
Print ads were once the standard format for creative advertising. But as more and more advertising dollars are allocated to digital outlets, print advertising is seen as an expensive, untrackable, traditional media format.
You would think the category is void of innovative ideas, but that’s certainly not the case. In fact, many brands are finding new ways to merge the digital and physical world through magazine and newspaper ads.
As a side note, did you ever see a commercial that you liked and watch it? Can you remember the brand? We would love to hear what it was. Would you do us a favor and tell us in the comments section?
What is interactive advertising?
Interactive advertising refers to promotional techniques that include an element of feedback from those to whom the advertisements are directed. This feedback gives the advertiser analytical data that can be used to improve the advertising methods being employed.
Interactive advertising is usually used to refer to online advertising, but can also be applied to offline advertising methods such as consumer surveys.
Editors Li and Leckenby (2000) defined interactive advertising as the “paid and unpaid presentation and promotion of products, services and ideas by an identified sponsor through mediated means involving mutual action between consumers and producers.”
This is most commonly performed through the internet; often through the use of an ad server that can deliver a variety of interactive advertising units.
The objectives of interactive advertising are usually akin to those of traditional tracking, i.e. to sell a product. This, in turn, means that many of the traditional elements of advertising impact and effectiveness remain relevant, even within the scope of interactive media.
However, according to the Journal of Interactive Advertising 2001, interactive advertising also has some properties that expand the range of potential objectives and that improve advertising effectiveness.
Interactive advertising also has the potential to decrease the losses associated with poorly coordinated advertising, to reduce the difficulties commonly encountered in clearly communicating an advertising message and to help overcome new product hurdles.
Elements of interactive advertising
There are many different facets to interactive advertising, including varying methods and types. Using many different types of cognitive tools and advert presentations, organizations can enhance the impact of their campaigns with this type of advertising.
According to Thorson (1996), all advertisements can be classified into one of five basic categories, including product/service, public service announcement, issue, corporate and political.
Advert types also interact with the user’s motives to influence outcomes or consumer responses, reinforcing the need for Interactive Advertising as a means of persuading potential consumers and target audiences.
Using the Internet as the main medium for interactive advertising to study the methods, types, and outcomes, we can then sound out the different user or advertiser controlled aspects.
Here are 9 interactive ad examples that should make you rethink the word traditional. Some of them are produced with a huge budget, some of them for nothing at all.
Interactive advertising examples … a hunter shoots a bear
This is a short video that gives the viewer the opportunity to rewrite the ending script. A cool way to get real meaningful customer engagement.
For the time of writing this post, the video had 17 million views on YouTube and the 1st million came during the first 36 hours.
Purchase intent in Europe went up 100%. Sales 30%!
Check out this neat ad and see what you think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fPdYlb8ow0
Skittles double-interactive ad.
Skittles’ double-interactive ads
This design is a very simple idea and very easy to implement. But it is not a very effective customer engagement, in my opinion. All 5 videos of this campaign got about 10 million views altogether.
Call to action at the end of the video could be much stronger. People are still in WOW emotion after watching the video and the next 5 seconds is the best time to engage them. At least they should ask people to become a Twitter follower or a Facebook fan.
What is your opinion of this ad?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lodoi_aoek0
Interaction ad secrets: how to promote a tongue cleaner?
Who said that marketing boring products have to be boring? Orabrush CEO said in September 2010 that YouTube has raised their sales by over a million USD and the biggest pharmacy chain wants their product on their shelves.
Do you find this passively interactive ad to be entertaining?
Budweiser ran an interactive TV ad that rewarded “interactors” with a game and chance to win a trip to the World Cup. According to a case study examining this campaign, around 890,000 people interacted with the ad by “pressing the red” and 90 percent of the interactors played the “Heads Up” game to win World Cup tickets.
Interactors reportedly spent an average of just over seven minutes interacting, but 38 percent thought they’d spent 10 minutes or more interacting! Both are very impressive interaction results, aren’t they?
See a video of the Budweiser interactive TV ad here on YouTube.
For this interactive TV commercial, Axe created games where viewers controlled bikes and did a stunt using the arrow keys. Other options also brought up a slow-motion version of the stunt and information about Axe body spray.
The ad was shown to 60 million homes that have either DirecTV or Dish Network. In just a few weeks, 3.5 million people watched the video and spent an average of five minutes playing with the ad. Not too shabby, eh?
OK, this was one of the first interactive TV promotions to really get some buzz. As described from the press release dated Nov. 17, 2008: “TiVo subscribers can seamlessly access their Domino’s Pizza order from various advertising entry points on the TiVo user interface…by clicking on “Order Your Pizza”.
They can log-in with a simple account number, build their pizza order right from the television set by selecting the type of crust, toppings, and sauces, and get the pizza delivered by their local Domino’s Pizza.”
This particular promotion was not e-commerce enabled, so you paid for your pizza when it arrived. But how hard would it be to add a pay feature now? Not too hard in my opinion.
In conclusion, the way to think about interactive advertising is this: anything you can do on a Web site you will be able to do with interactive ads.
They will become much more action-oriented to encourage viewer/user behavior and shows will have new revenue opportunities with product placement and embedded calls to action (really saving them).
Finally, tracking will be extended to television in a whole new way and will really raise the bar on marketing and advertising performance and accountability. So, what is the good news for online professionals? Online marketers already work in this kind of atmosphere!
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Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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The best advert on TV? Easy – Lynx, nothing about what’s in it; how it smells; it’s test friendly; or how much it costs. You splash some of this on son and you’re gonna get……….Leave people in no doubt what the product can do for them.
Interesting … will check it out/ Thanks for sharing.
The best advert on TV? Easy – Lynx, nothing about what’s in it; how it smells; it’s test friendly; or how much it costs. You splash some of this on son and you’re gonna get……….Leave people in no doubt what the product can do for them.
Interesting … will check it out/ Thanks for sharing.