Entertaining through online advertisement: Google Chrome

Online Advertising is just over 10 years old - that is to say, agencies have been selling space online for attention/action-grabbing purpose for that long (the Interactive Advertising Bureau was founded in 1996 - they're the folks who set standard banner dimensions etc...).

Over the course of this decade not much has changed when it comes to banner ads - perhaps new sizes of ads have become standardized, delivery platforms have become more accesible, ads themselves a now ubiquitous facet ofthe web-browsing experience and visual terrain, but it has only been recently that advertisers began to address how these ads can be unique to the web. 

Don't get me wrong, I know 'Punch the Monkey' spots couldn't be placed in a magazine - soliciting click-throughs with moving objects is certainly an 'interactive' type thing. However, simple ads like that miss the potential for facilitating a true web experience and benefiting from that.  The online ad industry is still young and its obvious most advertisers (if not agencies they hire) are concerned with charging per click rather than per impression - that distinction is their value measure in online space but it relies on success being when someone is sent to a specific destination where a very [print-style] conventional adspace is wholly owned by the advertiser.

People want to keep going until they want to stop on the web, and not stop where someone else tells them to - one simple destination to 'read more' and then end an experience of learning about something isn't very satisfying ands rapidly feeling more un-weblike.

I came across an example recently of one advertiser who has an accurate grasp of this phenomenon when we added a Google campaign on jcreport.com to advertise Google's Chrome browser.  What makes this campaign so reflective of the 'now' state of the web is the campaign's use of web-video; they've created a sort of online short film festival with each entry focused on their product - Google Chrome [browser]. The ad tags we serve on jcreport.com offer a flash video to a person looking at the JC Report - within a banner ad space.  Whilst looking at the space, whether the video is playing or not, you can click through to Google Chrome Shorts' youtube channel to watch more videos - much cooler than clicking directly over to say, http://www.google.com/chrome [where you could potentially learn more about the software and download it.].

I love the Google Chrome Shorts campaign, and thinks it represents an effective use of web-ad space because it :

• Engages people using videos,
• Employs multiple narratives using totally different videos directed/produced by different people etc,
• Takes you to a next step upon click which isn't a dead end, entertainment-wise
• Reinforces Google's youtube website

A lot of lessons can be learned for groups advertising online by this example and checking out the Google Chrome Shorts channel on youtube.

An example video from the campaign is below.