Advertisers Flip For Flip
Posted by anastasia on 01-22-2007
It's funny, when I was getting my masters in journalism from Medill, I helped one of my professors, Abe Peck, with a research project he was working on — it involved looking at magazine web sites to see whether they were following ASME guidelines about clearly labeling their advertising. Times have certainly changed since 1999. Just as Tivo and DVRs have inspired a huge increase in product placement and branded entertainment, advertisers are looking beyond banner ads to reach their target audiences online. MediaWeek is reporting that Flip (Conde Nast's new "MySpace for teen girls," which btw now has a launch date, February 6, and a publisher, Jane Grenier) will "offer its users an unprecedented amount of control: over what advertising they see on the site and in what manner it is displayed." Allegedly, Flip is likely to pull in $2 million in advertising before launch. Here's what they plan to do:
The primary ad-units on Flip are nonbranded digital images that members can use however they’d like to populate their “Flip books” — which are sort of mini photo albums/diaries/digital scrapbooks that a given user creates within her profile. For example, retailer Nordstrom is supplying images of models wearing its apparel that girls can paste in their Flip books, which can only be identified as Nordstrom-wear if users click on them. Johnson & Johnson’s Clean & Clear is taking it a step further by simply providing word-play icons — such as “FRESH” — while displaying neither a logo nor its products. Even riskier for advertisers: Girls can use a virtual doodling tool to write on their pages and say whatever they want about these brands.
There are traditional banner ads in some parts of Flip, including on individual profile pages. But even on those pages, the girls themselves decide which brands’ ads will appear during the setup phase.
More and more advertising and content are merging to become one in the same — even with user generated content. When I was at Current TV, we chose to separate uploaded V-CAMs or viewer created ad messages from Pods. Both in the creative process and in the display of the viewer created content on the site. Check out my older post about the Chinese Wall coming down. What do you think about the fusion of advertising and interactive content in the way Flip is proposing? Brilliant or Brave New World?
P.S. How funny is this quote? It's from Hubert Boehle, president-CEO, Bauer Publishing, explaining how their new pub for twentysomethings (AdAge.com, reg. required) called Cocktail (which immediately makes me think of Tom Cruise throwing drinks in the air) will serve its web savvy readers in a "timely" fashion:
"And, let's face it, this is the first generation of readers who grew up with the internet, so they are used to getting timely information. That is why Cocktail is a weekly."
Categorized under: Web
