Proctor and Gamble has made a great step in the right direction with their new mobile and web show Crescent Heights.

That’s right, advertisers are starting to learn that the focus has to be on the content and not on just pitching a product. By doing this they can build their brand image. The NYTimes article about the show explained what’s so important about this:

The initiative follows that of other marketers and retailers who have found that, especially among their younger customers, sometimes the best way to advertise is to, well, not advertise.

How could they do an even better job? Advertise even less. Right now Tide is still too front and center. The logo sits at the top left, which is far too prominent. The website is www.tidecrescentheights.com.

Next time, the show should be the number one brand, not Tide. Offer it as a video podcast, put it in the iTunes podcast directory. This is the next step: companies learning to free their content.

All things considered, it’s still great that they’ve managed to get this far.

Google now offers click-to-play video ads.   The ads show a still image which the user can click on to cause the video to play.  .  It’s important to design the initial stills so that they’re interesting enough to grab the user’s attention and inspire them to watch the videos.

Here’s what’s really amazing about the program: Google doesn’t charge the advertiser to show the first image, and then they don’t charge to play the video!  They only charge once the user has clicked through to the advertiser’s website.

This is great for advertisers because they can get away with free branding.  It’s worthwhile even if the user doesn’t click through to the corresponding website.

It’s like paying for an ad on network television only if people visit the company’s website after viewing the ad!  With this great benefit in mind, it’s important to make that initial still image as compelling as possible.

At 10ton, we have become fans of a particular form of advertising that has a great deal of potential online: branded content. Branded content is an ad that draws your attention to the product, but provides an experience that’s more like entertainment. What makes branded content different?

• People can pass it along to their friends. The current buzzword for this phenomenon, a term which we’re not too enamored with, is going viral. The best way to improve the odds of this happening is to make your ad as entertaining as possible.

What does branded content look like? It can be anything from a short video to a whole online TV network. Your Perfect Girl is branded content, promoting a dating site. Bud.tv is a whole network of branded content, consisting of online shows designed to appeal to beer drinkers. A new site, Get the Glass is a 3d milk themed video game for kids.

In my next post I will go further into why branded content works, and why the Internet is the perfect venue for this hybrid form of advertising.

Google recently launched a series of video ads, which I first saw on LinkedIn, a business social network that now features video advertising throughout the site.

This ad has a homemade look to it, as if a bunch of Google engineers made it up and shot it right in their cubicles. It features a bunch of evil puppets that attempt to deliver spam into another puppet’s Gmail account, meeting their untimely doom at the hands of a giant pair of scissors. It reminds me of a low-budget version of the Fandango paper-bag characters.

What’s innovative about this ad is that it’s part of a series, and links to other ads in the series are embedded right in the player. So if a viewer finds this ad entertaining, they can just click the “next video” link to watch another video in the series.

Another interesting aspect of this ad is the product it’s for. You’d never see a traditional TV commercial for a product like GMail. First, GMail absolutely free, and that makes buying expensive TV time uneconomical. Second, Gmail appeals to a fairly narrow audience when compared with mass-market consumer products like cola, diapers, and insurance.

This is the first Google commercial I can ever recall seeing. As online commercials become more prevalent, companies that traditionally haven’t made commercials will start to do so. This will happen because the Internet makes the cost of distribution dramatically lower. Online, the creative will make up a much greater share of the cost of producing a commercial compared to buying TV time.

The only problem with this ad was that when I wanted to watch more of them, I couldn’t find it again on LinkedIn! If you’re going to make something that’s entertaining, make sure to provide a way to get back to it!

Who likes talking about tampons, or back hair, or pregnancy tests?

Apparently, some people really do!

According to today’s New York Times the marketing approaches taken by makers of many formerly taboo products, such as condoms and female hygiene products, are changing. Products formerly relegated to innuendo are taking the front door – introducing racy, and often hilarious new ad strategies.

With it’s generally permissive flavor, viral online video is at the forefront of this movement – pushing both the boundaries and funny bones of all those watching.

Here’s a wildly successful internet-only spot for the Philips Norelco Bodygroom shaver directed at men under 40 who want to give a little trim to ‘all those other parts’.

And while it seems unclear whether the trend of hairless men will continue – it does seem to be working for advertisers.

Philips Norelco reported a triple in forecast sales of the Bodygroom shaver.

Assuming YouTube’s 3-second ads cause no unwanted head explosions (see my previous post), we’re going to have to find creative ways to take advantage of very very short blips of video. While these ads are still intrusive, at least they’re short.  Three seconds can only be so annoying.

How to make the most of three seconds?

• 90 Subliminal Ads Why waste the virtual eternity of three seconds on one ad? Assuming the video runs at 30 frames per second that can be 90 individual one-frame ads. Some of them are bound to make an impression.
• Hold a Sign and Scream It’s going to be hard to establish a new brand with this short time period. A great ad might be someone holding a sign with a company’s logo on it with them screaming the name of the company. How many times can you scream, “COKE!” in three seconds? Seven.
• Make a series If YouTube is smart, they’ll let us purchase a sequential series of ads. What that means is that I can make it so that a given user will see only my ads in the series that I choose. With that technology I can actually have each ad build on the other, perhaps with a narrative? While it’s a challenge, I think it’s possible to tell a story in ten three-second spots. For a perfect example of this take a look in the New Yorker. All throughout the magazine are tiny little cartoons, about the size of a postage stamp. Follow them through the magazine and you’ll see that the make up a short story.

I’ve noted before, that a viewer walks away with the same number of impressions when fast-forwarding through them on a TiVo as he does when the commercials just play. Maybe these three-second ads really will make a difference.

If you a person who’s has a conversation with me since December, you’ve probably heard me mention this book. Once again, if you’re interested in figuring out where advertising is going, I couldn’t recommend it more. But for those of you who are too lazy to read the whole book… here’s Part 2 of my series on Life After the 30-Second Spot.

Jaffe brings up a shocking fact on page 15 about DVRs (aka TiVo):

David Poltrack, executive vice president of Research and Planning at CBS television, recently reassured us that DVRs are not much of a threat as once thought because internal research revealed that ad skippers recalled, on average, two commercials and one brand, which is essentially the same level of recall as with live TV.  This is just insane.

Wow. Let’s consider the implications:

• People don’t pay attention to TV commercials at all. Maybe it’s because the ads are intrusive? Are they improperly targeted? Maybe they just suck.
• An average TV ad is just as interesting when fast forwarding as when it’s playing at normal speed. Sounds like the ads aren’t very interesting.
• It’s really hard to get people’s attention. Certainly true.

The funny thing is, the people watching the DVR might be a more captive audience. Here are two scenarios:

• Viewer A doesn’t have a TiVo, and he got home just in time to catch the latest episode of Lost. After the first commercial break starts he runs to the bathroom, gets a snack, and then finally reaches the TV after the break is over.
  Total Impressions: 0
• Viewer B has set her TiVo to record Lost and start about twenty minutes late, so she can skip the commercials. In the meantime she’s already gone to the bathroom and had a snack. Once the first commercial break starts she hits the fast-forward button three times and whizzes through commercials in no time. However, her eyes are fixed on the screen. She sees a Burger King logo, a 3d-animated Mr. Clean (no logo necessary), and a Hummer. It’s important to realize that she’s been looking at the screen the whole time.
  Total Impressions: 3

Why is everyone so afraid of the TiVo?
Joseph Jaffe’s blog is located at www.jaffejuice.com

A term that’s been going around a lot is permissive advertising, which eventually is going to be the only worthwhile kind of advertising online, and everywhere else.

Intrusive ads have been around for a while, and they work, but who really likes them? An editor I know leaves CNN all day long. A few months ago, every time I was in his suite, I would see the HeadOn commercial. “HeadOn, Apply Directly to Forehead. HeadOn, Apply Directly to Forehead. HeadOn, Apply Directly to Forehead.” The commercial was so fantastically annoying that we would make fun of it constantly. He eventually went out and bought me some HeadOn, which I proudly displayed on top of my monitor for a week, until it fell behind the desk.

Yes, that kind of advertising works, just as I’m sure someone sold a lot of X10 web cams from those evil pop-behind ads that were once all over the Internet, but really, it’s a one trick pony. Is any company going to be able to build a real brand by doing this? Permissive advertising is really the way that everyone is going to have to go.

Three-hundred sixty four days a year, TV ads are, at best, forgettable background noise. People don’t pay much attention or give them a second thought.  But as we all know, there’s one day on which the ads are the star. On Super Bowl Sunday, people eagerly anticipate each year’s crop of creative ads, and gather around with their friends to watch them, and talk about them afterwards. The ads are as much an event as the game.

What makes an ad an event? It has to be inherently entertaining, so that people want to watch on its own merit, even if they have no initial feelings about the product. It has to be so good that people will seek it out, set aside time to watch it, and share it with their friends. And they’ll come away with a positive impression of the product.

TV ads work by relentlessly repeating a message until it’s drilled into the viewer’s mind. But there’s no way this will work online. On the Web, anything forgettable or intrusive is just going to annoy people, waste their time, and leave a bad impression—if the user doesn’t click away first.

Like Super Bowl ads, the best online ads are actively sought out on their own merit, as a shared experience with friends. Thanks to the email, IM, social networks and other online tools, the Internet creates a cultural space for social interaction around advertising. People will link to the best ads on YouTube, embed them in their blogs, and send them to their friends. They’ll talk about cool new ads with the same enthusiasm they’d talk about about a hit song or a new book.

The best online ads are events. Because on the Internet, it’s Super Bowl Sunday 365 days a year.