Online advertising fail…by two of the biggest brands.
NBC and the NFL tried out an exciting new feature to complement their well produced broadcast of Football Night in America, the Sunday night prime-time football game. ESPN has been pioneering online video feeds of college football games on its ESPN360 service, sometime I’ve been using religiously these past few weekends (much to the detriment of my productivity). On Sunday, NBC and the NFL was going to broadcast the game online live, in HD, with in-browser DVR-like controls, and let the viewer switch between five different cameras at anytime during the game (main feed, overhead cable cam, sideline game, end zone cam, and “star” cam). For free.
Despite being a fun game, I felt like turning it off by halftime. Why? Because its not enjoyable to be bludgeoned to death by repetitive advertisements. I kept track of the online video advertisements shown to me during the 3 (three) hours that I had the video feed going:
Over 3 hours of primetime television to a user in the lucrative college educated, professional, 18-to-45 male demographic, I was shown 44 minutes of advertising and witnessed only 7 unique advertisements. Actually 5 if you don’t count NBC’s previews for the winter Olympics. I saw the same Visa advertisement 30 times, often twice in the same commercial break. And I’ve now completely internalized the fact that Gillette can make me play like Tiger Woods, land the business deal, and score babes.
The problem? I’ve had a VISA credit card for nearly 6 years. I was a Sprint customer for 8 years before only recently switching to AT&T, for a good reason. I’m a vegetarian, so being told 15 times that Subway has a new chicken sandwich doesn’t do it for me. They had a lucrative demographic engaged to their site for 3 primetime viewing hours, and they utterly failed in providing their advertisers a return on investment.
What’s inexplicable to me is that we’re talking about the two of the biggest brands in America — the NFL and NBC. Using YouTube’s popularity as a benchmark, online video has been a ‘big deal’ for the past 3 years. The idea of online advertising has been around for over a decade. While TV represents ‘dumb’ advertising outlets that couldn’t tell advertisers who exactly they were reaching, the Internets can tell them a lot of information — even basic info like how long I’ve uniquely been watching your video feed. After all this, the concept of a “If User has seen Advertisement A more than N times, Show User Advertisement B” seems to fail them? I often feel that I’m at point where I’d rather just tell an advertising network what things I’m interested in, and suffer through somewhat interesting and relevant commercials rather than wanting to hammer thumbtacks into my eyes (although honestly, this year’s sports announcing crews are making that a more desirable experience anyway).
It’s no wonder then that there are a lot of online video advertising startups. It’s still amazing to me how these two huge brands can fail so spectacularly, especially since they were able to put together such a compelling online video product. Let’s see what happens next week.