Driving Advertising: IBM Global Business Services Study

Ever since Michael Gass posted highlights from the executive summary of the IBM Global Business Services study on advertising, some people have been wondering what it all means. We broke it down into the reality, rewards, and risks associated with four segments.

Highlights From The IBM Global Study

IBM Study. Attention: Consumers are increasingly in control of how they view, interact with and filter advertising in a multichannel world, as they continue to shift their attention away from linear TV and adopt ad-skipping, sharing and rating tools.
Reality. Companies will have to consider increasing smaller groups of consumers, with increased sensitivity that even similar groups will react very differently to their message.
Reward. It will reinforce the concept that demonstrating a product and service contrast works.
Risk. In a world full of purple cows, no cow is different.

IBM Study. Creativity: Technology is allowing for more user-generated and peer-delivered content, and new ad
revenue-sharing models, allowing amateurs and semi-professionals to create lower-cost advertising content.
Reality. Other studies show that there is already an increasing demand by consumers to have someone help them vet the quality of content from the quantity of the content.
Reward. Some new talents may be discovered, creating unique opportunities for companies to support them.
Risk. It may take considerable time to swing back from popularity- and affirmation-based recommendations to objective consideration. However, over reliance on consumer-generated marketing will fade as companies realize consumers have a finite amount of time to invest in every company with a contest.

IBM Study. Measurement: Advertisers are demanding more individual-specific and involvement-based measurements, putting pressure on the traditional mass market model.
Reality. Shrinking representative tracking measures that skewed toward select demographics died three years ago.
Reward. Companies will be able to better understand the consumer they are trying to reach.
Risk. Over reliance on click measurements produces disastrous decisions; over targeting to smaller groups already creates inconsistent messages for many organizations. Someone has to move beyond group think.

IBM Study. Advertising Inventories: New entrants are making ad space that once was proprietary available through open, efficient exchanges. As a result, more than half of the ad professionals polled expect that open platforms will, within the next five years, take 30 percent of the revenue currently flowing to proprietary incumbents such as broadcasters.
Reality. Broadcasters will either return to creating quality content and maximizing their revenues with non-advertising revenue or they will become indistinguishable and perhaps less entertaining than consumer content.
Risk. Budgets will shrink, advances will disappear, and the best broadcasters once offered will be gone. Bundling could make the auction markets less palatable much like uncontrolled rotates today.

There is little doubt that advertising will change dramatically in the next five years. And while many people consider it an evolution, some change has an equal opportunity to be a digression. What do you think? Did anybody read it? IBM Global Study.

What Others Think

• Follow the leader is a dangerous game, particularly when you follow Hippos… by Mark Allen Roberts

• IBM Study: The end of advertising as we know it by DreamGrow Digital

• Advertisers becoming more agressive, so what is the ideal relationship? at Zero Degrees