Last week, I left the offices of the advertising agency where I work and treated myself to six hours of personalised, digital entertainment - without ads.
On the bus home I listened to British pirate radio queen Julie Adenuga’s new show on Beats 1, the recently launched 24-hour mobile radio station, before flopping on the couch to watch three uninterrupted hours of Canadian sci-fi thriller, Orphan Black, on Netflix.
Pretty much every year since we picked up the smartphone has been labeled a strange, exciting time to be in the ad game, but I question if there’s every been an era quite as profoundly shape-shifting as the one we now find ourselves in.
Between the extraordinary success of Netflix locally, the likely obliteration of competition that will come with the golden age of music streaming and of course, Facebook’s plans to bring legacy media inside the newsfeed for good, it appears that on many fronts, advertising will need to go fully native or go home.
The clash between traditional advertising and future-facing digital platforms is nothing new. What’s changed is that agencies are now dealing with a new Hydra; omnivorous tech companies with cash reserves that exceed those of the United States government.
And unlike media outlets, or old-school content creators who depend on ad revenue to survive, these companies can afford to cast out innovative loss leaders, like Beats 1 Radio, while consumer investment (or churned out, automated advertising) reinforces their already swelling bottom line.
Smart creative shops, and in particular their planners, will have already started asking the tough questions. What does an ad on an ad-free TV channel look like? How can I speak to consumers on a radio station with no commercial breaks on a broadcaster that doesn’t need my media money? If publishers are now profit-sharing with Facebook, will Facebook allow banners or creative they don’t control?
(‘Probably not’ is the answer to the last one. Which is fine. Any client requesting banner ads in 2015 really deserves a nice digital ice bath. )
Briefs will change in a big way – or at least they should. It’s no accident that much of this year’s award-winning advertising looks more like content and actively jostles for viewing attention, rather than acknowledging where we conventionally understand ads to live.
Google and Facebook might have carved out the borders of a once-infinite Internet, but consumers still used all those platforms to watch 2015’s Cannes-killer, #LikeAGirl. But not all client briefs call for awards, and most of them don’t have the budgets to stick Jean Claude-Van Damme between two trucks. Some of them might just really want to sell a new phone plan, or alcoholic beverage, and banking on virality starts to look like a gamble rather than a sure bet.
Anyone who has submitted a request to an app store or attempted to avoid the 20% text rule on Facebook will know that new media tech overlords come with incredibly arcane rules for advertisers. As they start to become less about connecting people and more about connecting people to the entire world (hello, Project Loon), we can expect that this fastidiousness will only become more pronounced.
Traditional wisdom has it that editorial and advertising sit on opposite sides of town, and liaise through media. Native is already dissolving these boundaries, but the ad-free takeover by major tech players messes with the formula entirely. When your media is your platform, and your platform is actually doing just fine without any advertising, ‘getting creative’ takes on a whole new meaning.
For much of Australia, this remains a way off. News.com.au, ostensibly a clickbait nightmare, still receives 3.5 million hits per month. Southern Cross Austereo receives close to a million listeners in the same period. But according to Nielsen there are 10 million Australians on Facebook per day, and in less than a year, Netflix has amassed 10 times the subscriber base of Foxtel. You can argue against incoming generations, but you can’t fight numbers like that.
As more Aussies play in content arenas with limited or no ads, creative agencies will need to be smart and agile enough to challenge these new tech-media hybrids in their own backyard. Because make no mistake; if you’re playing anywhere else, you’ll soon be on your own.
By Jonno Seidler
Copywriter at Leo Burnett Sydney