Branding and the Internet

The Internet has been around since the 1970s, but it did not have a tremendous impact on the way we advertise and respond to advertising until the end of the 20th century. Today, there is not a print ad, radio spot or television spot without a website somewhere in the message. However, that type of solution to making advertising more interactive is simplistic at best.

Advertising is becoming much more a part of a direct response system. We demand interactivity in everything now, and if you look ahead a few years to where the TV and computer will merge in terms of home use, our whole concept of what constitutes advertising may have to change.

The film The Minority Report offered a peek at future possibilities for advertising: Tom Cruise walking by an animated billboard that addresses him by name because the database knows he might be interested in that product; a newspaper updated via the Internet to show breaking news. As futuristic as these things seem now, within a few years we may look back on them and think they were pretty tame. The technologies are already there.

The Internet can already reach us everywhere at every moment of our lives, so it’s hard to overestimate the impact it will continue to have in the future. What does that mean for ad agencies? Well, if my survey of current ad agency websites is any indication, it means we are behind the eight-ball as an industry. In my opinion, ad agency websites are generally the least interactive and least interesting on the Internet. This may be a case of the shoemaker who doesn’t have time to mend his own shoes. I think it’s just plain embarrassing.