If you haven’t yet seen Centro board member Andrew Swinand’s recent guest column in Advertising Age “Want to Win the Race to the Bottom? Don’t Invest in Tech” you’re missing out on one of the most prescient analyses of why agencies need to find new ways to raise their efficiencies and, in turn, their profitability.
Is the advertising industry willing to look at itself and acknowledge that it has a big problem? Can anything reverse what seems like a race to the bottom and allow a rainbow to emerge?
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Read the Entire Story on Advertising Age
Eleven years ago today Centro came to life.
I had no idea if it would be successful or a colossal failure but I felt passionately about trying to build a better type of company while also changing the advertising industry for the better.
The 2008 election ushered in an era of internet-based voter engagement, but that was about a million years ago in terms of how quickly the web has come to dominate nearly every aspect of campaign strategy, voter opinion gathering and messaging machinery.
What makes an ad effective? Nielsen lists the top five characteristics of ads that exhibit strong brand linkage among consumers, including brand cues early and often (visual and verbal), leveraging the brand icon, integrating the brand in a storyline, establishing ownable creative concepts, and using messaging as a brand cue.
A few weeks back in an article published on Centro’s blog titled “What do you mean you don’t see my ad?” I wrote this about viewable impressions:
“What if print advertisers only paid newspapers for the ads that were seen by their intended target? As in, “Hey, our ad on page 5, Section B wasn’t seen by 34.5% of the audience, so we’re only sending you a check for part of the contract.” Not possible? The stuff of a futuristic Sci-Fi world where devices are implanted in our eyes and monitored by unseen beings?
Phones have become the new lighters at concerts. Thousands of small illuminated screens dotted the arena. And while I, along with the marketing team, followed suit with our own phones, I couldn’t help but see thousands of small illuminated advertising opportunities. I laughed and mentioned that this was a blog post waiting to be written.
