What’s Interesting about the “Now Web”

by John Gerzema on June 29, 2009

Today I read a fascinating post on the first web based mention of Michael Jackson’s untimely death and the subsequent avenues of amplification via the web. Most fascinating to me was the three hour lag between the original x17 posting and Google News pickup of the story in its feed. What does that gap mean for a technology company looking to offer a tool for media buying based not on page context, but on the social context of clicked links and the instantaneous crowds on certain sites or articles.

I am someone who’s interested in how the emerging “Now Web” might play into successful strategies for our clients. For instance, what if I had been able to follow Bit.ly and find out 10 minutes ahead of time that this TMZ story was taking off, with that information could I have made a spot buy on TMZ and owned that ad real estate for the bulk of the traffic spike. Seems to me that would have been an excellent way to get in front of a lot of people, kind of like a momentary Super Bowl. What’s intriguing to me is the idea of doing this on a regular basis across a wide range of traffic spikes (recognizing that this was an extraordinary spike) and figuring out how to maximize the value of my ad inventory using social context.

Twitter, bit.ly, wikipedia and other tools of the now web represent a fascinating new space that marketers must get a handle on. To simply think about these tools as output and distribution is to miss their transformative potential which I believe lies in the derivatives that come from analyzing the underlying data. For anyone interested in this, I hope you’ll drop me a comment so that we can connect.

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    John, interesting post. There's no doubt that an event like Michael Jackson's passing would generate tremendous audiences, quickly.

    But, online audiences are different from audiences in almost every other media in one respect: the nature of their attention.

    Would that large audience's attention would be so focused on the event that they would literally fail to see the surrounding ads? I theorize that they would suffer from a very real phenomenon called "Inattentional Blindness", which I blogged about here: http://tjcnyc.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/inattent...

    If so, here's a contrarian opinion: perhaps the best response in the "Now Web" era would to move ads *away* from large but highly task-focused audiences to large audiences that are not focused on a specific piece of news.

    There's no doubt that the Now Web opens new tactical possibilities. But, which response would yield the best results? I'm curious to hear your POV.
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    Tom I enjoyed your post and theory on 'inattentional blindness'. I encourage the brandbubble readers to check it out.

    It's interesting that surrounding ads might be proportionately blocked by the saliency of a news topic, but most marketers online are not out for awareness, but engagement. So just as with traditional media, the likelihood of consumer being engaged with your ad online is based on the interest level of your category and the quality/appropriateness of your message. And fortunately it's an eminently testable theory, because you pay for what you get (you can measure your clicks).
    Make sense? John
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    John, what you say makes a lot of sense. Shifting ad funds to a large audience driven by an event would be a great way to test my inattentional blindness theory.

    I work in both traditional and digital every day. This gives me some perspective on their differences. I agree most marketers online need engagement. But, it's tough -- online is a twitchier medium. Also, I'm hungry for a methodology that measures online engagement as well as Nielsen's IAG does for TV.

    Finding an engaged audience at scale -- in any medium -- is where the money is. Test like the one you propose are a really smart way to get there.
 

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