Honey, Trevor wants to shrink the ads

Trevor Beattie, advertising’s self-licensed controversialist, has proclaimed the death of the 30-second ad – and asserted that in future ads should be no longer than five seconds. Aside from the fact that short-form ‘blipverts’ already exist, he is right that the long-form ad is an anachronism and a bore says Dominic Mills.

Trevor Beattie – bless him. Without him, us advertising commentators would have to think up stuff to write about on our own, and we all know how hard that can be.

Trevor’s latest salvo is to proclaim the death of the 30-second ad, and assert that in the future (actually, he really means pretty much now) ads should either be no longer than five seconds long or at least 60-seconds. You can see him here on stage at Advertising Week – about 25 minutes in – explaining his thinking.

Trevor being Trevor (i.e. advertising’s self-licensed controversialist), this is often dismissed as yet another publicity-generating gesture (‘frizzy-haired headline grabbing guff’ or ‘bullshit’ are just two of the comments underneath the Guardian’s report). Whatever, even Radio 4 deemed the subject worthy of a couple of minutes on the PM programme.

Now, let us put aside first that such short-form ads already exist on TV; they’re called sponsorship idents, and they work pretty well. Over 20 years, they’ve progressed from being rather self-conscious and clunky to an effective means of communication, albeit dependent on heavy repetition. Most are longer than five seconds, but they could easily be shorter. So, as consumers, we’re well used to them.

Indeed, from time to time in the last 20 years adland has experimented with short-form TV ads, aka ‘blipverts’. They never really caught on, partly because this was in the dark ages (i.e. before smartphones, 0.001-second Google searches and Twitter), and partly because the commercial broadcasters deal in standard ad lengths and find the prospect of change mighty inconvenient.

Beattie’s real point, however, is that in a world of Twitter and Vine, or where everybody multi-screens and multi-tasks, the long-form ad is an anachronism and a bore. Of course, he exaggerates to make the point, but there is truth in what he says.

Indeed, Beattie’s most famous work for Wonderbra and FCUK illustrates his point well: as he describes them, they were ‘five-second ideas’ and certainly took less than five seconds to register with consumers.

So why can’t TV ads be the same? In fact, when you come to think about it, some of the discipline demanded by effective out-of-home advertising should be applied to other media.

Now you can take a the-world’s-going-to-hell-in-a-handcart view of this and say it’s all about dumbing down, a reflection of our collective attention deficit syndrome.

Or you can, as Beattie says, see it as a mark of the way human processing power and media literacy has increased so that we no longer need 30 or 60 seconds to absorb and understand messages. It’s laughable now, but if you go back to the early days of TV, ads were commonly 60 seconds, the assumption being that a) advertisers needed that amount of time to get the message over and b) we needed it to understand it (how patronising was that?).

Well, I’m with Beattie on that, and I’ll add one more reason: creative agencies are now skilled at distilling down the message and executing it so much so that they don’t need 30 seconds. Whenever I want to remind myself of how things used to be, I watch the first-ever ITV ad for Gibbs SR from 1955:

Would the five-second ad play hell with commercial TV as we know it? Of course. A three-minute ad break with 36 five-second ads would be a viewing nightmare. But why should the concept of the ad break be immune from change? Why, when advertising forms are changing so rapidly, are standard media-owner formats and slots stuck in a time-warp?

Equally, as Beattie says, the five-second format is not necessarily restrictive for advertisers. You could divide a longer ad into five-second episodes and run them over a three-minute break (were such a thing still to exist), or run sequential five-second units.

In fact, you could also argue that long (i.e. two-to-three minutes) ad breaks and long TV commercials (30 seconds and over) encourage viewers to fast-forward. Keep it all short and snappy and they’ll be less inclined to.

Self-restraint: a first from Microsoft (of all people)

Trevor Beattie was not the only person trying to reinvent advertising at Advertising Week. Step forward Microsoft, in the agreeable persona of Andy Hart, promoted earlier this month to head up advertising and online across Europe.

In a nutshell, Microsoft’s schtick is that online advertising has betrayed consumers by bombarding them at every turn with ugly, inappropriate, de-contextualised, mis-timed ads so that, no surprise, we’re all practising avoidance and efficacy is falling off a cliff. The proof? According to Hart, click-through rates have fallen by 95% in the last ten years.

Naturally, if this is bad for consumers, it’s bad (long-term, at least) for advertisers and potentially catastrophic for publishers like Microsoft.

“Ah,” optimists will say, “Big Data will change all this.”

Well, we’re already in the Big Data era, and it isn’t doing much because, as Hart says, “we don’t know what to do with [the data we have].”

Microsoft’s promise is effectively a social contract with consumers, part of which includes making ‘do not track’ the default option on Internet Explorer, retiring Hotmail and its horrible banners in favour of Outlook, and promising to offer consumers only ads which are “beautiful, useful and relevant”.

Who wouldn’t want that? But can they achieve this nirvana-like state of affairs? The answer, obviously, is Big Data – but better usage of it. Microsoft even describes this as the ‘apotheosis’ of Big Data – which sounds somewhat hubristic to me. No pressure then, Microsoft!

Of course, this sort of promise is nothing new. Over the years, various media owners have tried to tackle so-called ‘clutter’ – radio broadcasters in particular – by restricting break lengths and so on. Advertisers and agencies, naturally, saw these initiatives a back-door way to restrict supply and therefore jack up the price.

So is that Microsoft’s real game? Well, possibly – and there’s nothing wrong with that. Unlimited, poor-quality inventory degrading the consumer experience is a bad thing. Advertisers might be willing to pay more for a better consumer advertising experience, especially if efficacy is improved.

But maybe there’s another angle too. The elephant in the room is Brussels and impending data legislation (and remember, Microsoft has a lot of ‘previous’ issues with the EU). Promising to clean up online advertising is one way to head off Brussels or limit the restrictions it is likely to impose.