Traditional advertising agencies have had more than a decade to embrace the Internet and are still mostly falling short. Their insistence on trying to adapt their outdated interruption advertising techniques to this interactive medium has led to billions of pounds being wasted on banner ads, pop-ups, pop-unders and of course possibly the most irritating weapon in the advertising agencies’ armoury – the eyeblaster format.

At best, these interruption techniques go largely ignored by internet users, and at worst become a major aggravation. With the amount of research and thinking that goes into the emotional impact of the creative behind an advertising campaign, it seems odd that the psychology behind annoying a consumer with a delivery system as crass as the eyeblaster format apparently goes unchallenged. Common sense would tell you that forcing someone to shut down an interruptive advertisement - or worse, unintentionally clicking through - goes beyond a poor brand experience and ventures into the realm of negative reinforcement.

A traditional advertising campaign is easily identified by the budget breakdown. A standard formula is 10 per cent of the campaign budget on “creative” and the remaining 90 per cent on buying space where the target market might look at it. Historically, traditional agencies have made the bulk of their revenue from media buying and, unable to shake a century of reliance on this cash cow, it shapes their thinking from the moment the client brief hits the desk. Even a forward-thinking digital phenomenon such as the online “viral campaign” has been reworked into the traditional model, becoming the antithesis of its actual description. It’s now widely considered as a TV ad on the Internet supported by “seeding” with a massive media buy.

As traditional agencies have spent the past decade applying their heavy-handed advertising techniques to the Internet and largely ignoring its interactivity, digital content producers, have stepped in to fill the void.

These production-led interactive specialists have embraced the planning and strategy techniques employed by traditional agencies and applied it to the world of interactive entertainment, leading to the advent of the “digital engagement agency”. This new hybrid can legitimately be considered the progeny of both the advertising and entertainment industries. The digital engagement agency sees no real difference in the process of planning and creating successful content for either industry and so is just as comfortable producing an interactive advertising campaign as it is crafting interactive entertainment for large broadcasters or e-learning.

These may seem initially to be vastly different disciplines but they are, in fact, underpinned by the same process:

1. Understand the audience/consumer
2. Engage with the audience/consumer
3. Educate the audience/consumer

Applying this process to produce engaging digital content has created documented successes including:

1. A campaign that increased a client’s sales by 127% month on month.
2. A campaign that engaged with more than 60 million consumers.
3. A campaign which explained the benefits of healthy eating to over 25 million people across in excess of 300 websites in one year.

These were three completely different executions for three completely different purposes. The only constant was total dedication to the principles of Digital Engagement, including the most contentious idea of all - reduced media spend. In these productions there was a traditional media buying spend of ­- £0 (nil).

Solely for legal reasons this document is © Jim Mcniven  Jan 2008 and is available under a Creative Commons licence.