Thoughts on the Future of Advertising by Michael Aged 21

We love a bit of engagement on our Twitter handle. We don’t see our foray into social media as being all about broadcasting our news, but very much about listening to our audience as well.

For the last few months I’ve been following @MichaelGillett who’s been following Microsoft for some time now, and we struck up a conversation about advertising as I wanted to know his thoughts.

I’m 39 – gulp! – and have been working in online advertising for over 10 years, so I was fascinated to get the thoughts of someone who was tech-savvy, connected and aware of the marketing messages he was receiving everyday, AND who couldn’t remember a world without the internet or mobile phones.

This is what he had to say, un-edited, about his experiences, his understanding, his hopes and his recommendations:

“Traditional adverts the world over seem to be loved and hated equally with some ads becoming “classics”, some ads leading to confusion, some ads causing offence but most ads just get forgotten about. It seems odd to me that something that has so much money spent on it just seems to be treated as a necessity and not as a form of art or entertainment. I believe that it is through technology, and in most cases emerging technology, that advertising can become far more effective and efficient.

I am no advertising expert, I’m a final year student at the University of Hertfordshire but I am a very keen technology user and Microsoft Student Partner and I have a few ideas about where advertising is going and some hopes about what advertising will be in a few years’ time. My only experience of adverts is from viewing them and limited knowledge of dealing with them on my site.

I say limited knowledge because I found that the adverts I could easily get on my site were ugly, unrelated and used up far too much space for the kind of payment I could get from them. I didn’t want a list of links to sites nor did I want large moving pictures and banners all over my site. The purpose of my site is to share my thoughts, ideas and reviews with my readers; it is not to show my readers adverts, a practice that sadly far too many sites seem to think is the purpose of having a site.

I understand ads are a necessary evil for much of the internet but surely there is a better way to advertise.

So what would make me put adverts on my site I hear you ask. Well for a time I did have adverts from Zune on my site, these were interactive ads allowing people to listen to a specific artist’s music and listen to related artists. It was the interactiveness of the ads that I liked, in fact they were so well designed it hardly looked like an ad at all but could have been described a feature of my site.

This is what I think adverts should be, they shouldn’t be obviously adverts but look more like part of a website or a feature. Therefore, the adverts need to be interactive in some way; it’s not possible for adverts to static any more, not with the coming of age of social networks. There are many ways for adverts to be interactive such as playing music, showing dynamic, real-time information about products, 3D tours of products, etc. Twitter and Facebook both have good examples of these kinds of adverts through promoted trends or social polls.

Obviously the most interactive type of entertainment is gaming and I think this will become an increasingly popular way to advertise; I don’t mean those “hook a duck” or “shoot a target” kind of games.

I expect that the kinds of games that will eventually come will be short but very immersive and captivating. One way to make people want to keep coming back to a game is to have leader boards so they compete with others. With use of social network integration it would be possible for people to compare their results to their friends and make it even more competitive. If advertisers were able to make people want to play these “games” then they would be on to a winner. I think that the use of leader boards (or a variation of them) and social integration will become an increasingly popular feature of adverts and advertising campaigns as it should mean people are more likely to engage with adverts.

So that’s where I believe advertising is heading but the next question is how people will access these ads. It is obvious that technology is going mobile and through the use of the cloud people are able to access anything from anywhere.

I find mobile apps that just add a banner ad are as annoying and as easily forgotten and ignored as a list of links of websites. I therefore hope that mobile apps will use the small form factor and sensor hardware along with the “always on” internet connection to make the apps more attractive and enjoyable. Some of Apple’s iAds (I am aware this is a Microsoft site) are a good example of this and I’d like to see this become more of the norm on mobile devices. It could well be possible that my idea for adverts that are games (or games that are adverts) could work even better on mobile devices than on websites.

With GPS in phones I envisage a future where ads are “smart” and are sent to one’s phone depending on one’s location. If I am in a shopping centre with certain shops then it would make sense for me to be informed of deals at those shops.

As a student I can assure you that gaming is the best procrastination around and it’s what a lot of students think they go to university to do. I also know that most of my friends have smartphones so I know that interactive adverts and ones aimed at mobile devices would do exceedingly well in the 18-25 segment.”

Enthralling stuff and not a million miles away from what we’ve been saying about advertising’s brave new world and our Digital Dozen.

My search marketing background picks out keywords like: technology, interactive, social integration, mobile, effective and efficient, dynamic and SMART!

Has Michael captured the essence of your brand’s future plans?

Are you seeing similar trends?

Or do his longings not stretch far enough?

Let us know below and thanks to Michael and thanks to you all for reading!

Have a great weekend!

Cheers

Mel

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