Advertisements as content

One of the interesting trends of advertising is its evolution into content. This is part of the bigger shift in advertising where they must evolve into something that is useful and desirable to users.

The biggest example of desirable advertisement in my mind is MTV:

Back in the 1970s the music recording industry was trying to capitalise on the emergence of pop music TV shows. Global artists like Queen, David Bowie, Abba and the Rolling Stones in the 1970s were finding that they could send "film clips" of their latest hits to be played on the shows, even when the artists themselves did not have time to fly all around the world promoting every new release of singles and albums. These precursors to the modern music video were very clearly developed as the promotional tools for new music. They were advertisements.

Beyond MTV, there are now many interesting experiments in turning advertisements into useful content. Here are some links that show these examples:

Contents and its Discontents
one day cosmetics companies will perhaps start beefing up their own Web sites — with makeup videos and click-to-buy options — just as kraftfoods.com has done with its hugely trafficked recipe site and walmart.com has done with its popular blogs by mothers.

Shows how advertisers are beginning to generate their own content, rather than rely on traditional channels like magazines. This opens an interesting opportunity: is there a market for a service to match independent content providers and advertisers directly?


IBM Turns Old NYT Editorial and PR Into Ads
The campaign is different in that the ads curate archived editorial on the environment from the Times and displays it right in the unit itself. The reader doesn't need to leave the page he/she is on to peruse the articles. Branding is light and the focus is on content. Needless to say, since all of the articles are by star columnist Thomas Friedman, the writing is strong.


NBC to create product focus shows
The collaboration between NBC and Omnicom offers "a unique way of giving brands a seat at the table with writers and producers in developing episodic programming that ties directly to brand needs,"

I don't know why but somehow I don't think this is going to work...


Bonus link: Advertisements from the past as desirable content

Posted in: advertising