Interactive Advertisements

Summary

One of Quebec’s largest cable companies has partnered with etc.tv, to offer Interactive Advertisements to over 300,000 of their digital cable customers. This is the first time that Canada will experience interactive advertising through digital cable.
No longer are commercial just limited to 30 and 60 second intervals. Now while one is watching a commercial, they can click a link that will provide more information on the product, or may lead to an extended version of the original commercial. This summer, consumers will begin to see interactive ads, and although there are 1.4 million Canadians who subscribe to digital cable, some crucial data regarding how effective these advertisements are, is still unknown. Even without this data, Mark Sherman, President of etc.tv “believes interactive ads give a new way to connect with clients” (Heinrich).

Analysis

Interactive ads are a new and exciting way to increase engagement with the consumer. In the article being discussed, they offer a fresh way to communicate with the customer, which go above and beyond the “30-second ad”. With that said, there does seem to be some shortcomings as well; particularly how the user interacts with the message, and the message itself.
Marketing is about communication, specifically communicating the benefits or hazards with a product, service, or idea. Communicating these messages becomes harder with the more that other people are trying to communicate their message. And having many messages being sent via 30-second ads, one can see just how easily it is to for that message to be ignored.
Interactive ads give marketers the ability to connect 30 and 60-second ads with info offering more about the product, or even longer, more detailed commercials.
Finally a tool that gives marketers more resources and time with a consumer, which one would assume would lead to a greater level of connection with the consumer, but I would argue might not be the case.
As we understand the Interactive Communication Model in chapter 8, both the sender and the receiver are communicating with the medium, but in the example from this article, this doesn’t seem to be the case. The Interactive ads lead from a regular commercial to either a longer commercial, or product information; the only interaction that the consumer has is in the choice to further look into the product, but even if they do, they are still just “listening” to ads, not interacting.
As well, we know that credibility and attractiveness are very important to an engaging ad, and while it seems that a longer commercial, or product information, would be easier to build credibility through extended product demos, I think that attractiveness isn’t effected at all. Making something longer, will not make it more attractive. In fact, I would argue that if the same criteria such as, appropriate celebrity endorsement or having a clear and popular image is ignored, the communication of a message still wouldn’t work. And what is worse that creating an expensive, bad, and unattractive 30-second ad? A more expensive, bad, and unattractive hour-long ad, that has the potential to not only fail at passing on the intended message.
I believe that Interactive ads will become more prevalent, and although I don’t think they are very “interactive”, when used correctly, they could offer more info to a consumer who is seeking it. But I think the most important aspect that must be addressed, are the same issues that need to be addressed with regular commercials; a strong message that is attractive and credible.