Jim Spanfeller, president of Forbes.com, on ad models
with
Don Schechter
Jim Spanfeller talks about the need for agencies to work out a new compensation model, the need for low cost/high return advertising solutions, and how consumer control has always been around, it just hasnt always been measurable.
Transcript: Jim Spanfeller, president of Forbes.com, on ad models
The challenges we see over the coming six months have as much to do with our own internal needs to continue growth as they do with the environment in general. It's a very competitive world out there, and one of the things about the web is it s very frictionless. So that means that folks who come to your site don t need to come back. So while on the one hand we have over 20 million unique visitors only a monthly basis to Forbes Interactive Properties, on the other hand there is no guarantee they are going to come back the next month, the next day or the next hour. So I always answer this question by suggesting that our biggest challenge is making sure that we are giving them as good or better an experience as anybody else in our category and hopefully any category, and by so doing we ll continue to get rewarded with their time.
The role that you'll see in the overall media net dynamic will certainly change dramatically, and it has already, but I think that most change is still yet to come. The idea of the 30-second television spot as the lingua franca of the landscape I think is quickly going away. It doesn't mean agencies are going to go away, it just means they re going to have to change a little bit how they think about life, and probably have to figure out ways of being compensated that will be more appropriate for what they ll be doing on a going forward basis. I think it s going to get much more involved with ROI, and that ROI is not going to be about just the core metrics of the campaign, although certainly that would be a very good thing, but it also has to be about the efficacy of the actual creative. And I also think creative will be much more numerous in the future than it has been in the recent past partly to do with costs, costs of production, costs of media, but the amount of creative executions in a given campaign has been collapsed over the last couple of decades, with the web and with digital media in general, the opportunity to increase the amount of creative is not only there but is necessary. So that s going to impact the overall cost structure of how an agency operates and how they need to operate on a going forward basis. I think if you think about the Superbowl Doritos commercial -- it was the third rated Superbowl commercial and was done by a consumer -- clearly the amount of dollars spent on that commercial were a fraction of the other commercials shown, yet it had every bit the efficacy of other commercials. I think that's going to be a model from a cost standpoint that agencies are going to have to find a way to replicate.
So in the past if you think about it there was very gross representations of people watching a television show, reading a newspaper, reading a magazine, etc. Now on the web you know on a story by story basis or a moment by moment basis how many people, who they are, how they're interacting, how long they re interacting with your content or with your message, and that is a transparency level that has never before been available and therefore it s giving this notion of consumer control which is very very true, but has been very true for a long period of time. It s only now that we are able to measure what that really means, and it s only now that consumer control is really being felt on the content side of the business.
One of the things that I talk about with our team all the time is that the lead that we've been able to scratch out, although formidable, is fleeting as we mentioned earlier. But what it does allow us to do is place more bets. So if we can place bets with the same amount of hit-rate as our competitive set or hopefully a better hit-rate, we'll by definition do that much better and increase our lead. If we don't place bets, or if we place bets and have a very low hit rate, we'll see our lead shrunk or erased.
