Questions for…Seth Haberman
Customizing Television Ads
To Keep Viewers on the Couch
When a television announcer says, "We'll be right back after these commercial messages," some couch potatoes consider it an open invitation to start changing channels. If Seth Haberman has his way, viewers will have a bunch of new incentives to stick around.
Visible World, the New York company of which Mr. Haberman is president and chief executive, has devised technology that offers advertisers the ability to digitally "tweak" their commercials so they contain elements relevant to viewers at the time they are seen. If enough advertisers go for the method, a beer commercial that airs during a baseball game could make mention of the teams that are playing, or a retailer could organize a daily countdown to an end-of-week sale that uses commercials that change every day.
'I have never seen anything interactive that could make you cry,' says Seth Haberman .
To be certain, such ideas could change the way the advertising industry works, from both a creative and a planning standpoint. Will viewers stay tuned? Will ad agencies need to make staff available 24/7 so advertisers can change their ads on a whim? Below, Mr. Haberman, 45 years old, offers some thoughts.
The Wall Street Journal: Many people are wringing their hands over the expected death of the 30-second TV commercial. But your company obviously sees life in this venerable means of promotion. Why?
Mr. Haberman: I have never seen anything interactive that could make you cry. When you seize control, it changes the way your mind is working. I have kids and I used to be a videogame programmer. When my kids play videogames, the heroes are killed a thousand times. There is no emotion other than the [exuberance] of what happens, not a sadness or a real deep emotional level in there. As you move from one level to the other, there is a bridge and they play a two-minute movie and the scene caused a tear to well in my son's eye because the hero dies in the bridge. Four hundred hours of interactive game-playing could not produce what a two-minute passage of narrative can. To create an emotional context, to create an empathy between a person in the audience and something that is going on on the screen is part of a passive narrative experience and not something that can be created in an interactive environment. If you have that as a guideline, you can make much more intelligent decisions if you are a marketer about how to spend your money, or if you are a programmer about what to invest in.
WSJ: If alternatives to TV commercials have been in the offing for a while, why has it taken people so long to act?
Mr. Haberman: If you are in the television ad-sales business, what do you see? You see, with the exception of 2001, year-by-year increases. In the case of broadcast, that's a remarkable record of garnering more dollars for less viewers, and so, if you are a guy who is in that business, you're doing OK. And all of the noise about technology and fragmentation, and all of these things, is not relevant to you. If you look at marketing, and see what percentage of a company's marketing dollars are spent on TV, if you start in the 1970s, the top 50-, 60-something percent of dollars were spent on television. You know what it is today? Today, it's just about 20%. So on a macro marketing level, TV is losing share. On a tactical, micro level, they are making more money. So what's the right thing to do -- continue on making more money or contemplate why dollars are flowing faster to many spaces, many of which are information-centric? For people whose job it is today to sell, they very rightly say, "Look, I'm still delivering stellar performance." If you are someone in the cable business, you have phenomenal growth. Why would I bother today to worry about something that hasn't affected the growth of my business?
WSJ: Advertisers who have sales and specials seem like obvious candidates for your service, but what other sorts of ways might the technology be used?
Mr. Haberman: The first is relating the offers directly to a customer. What the offer is is pretty straightforward to manipulate. The more you can tie them to sales or the more you can tie them to inventory or the more you can tie them to the audience, the more appropriate you are going to be. The second way is if you have relevance in a commercial. If you have a minivan, why is that relevant? For someone, it's about carrying kids around. For someone else, it might be about safety. For someone else, it might be about performance. You are touching upon relevant icons to people. The third, and we are seeing this as the genesis for some creative ideas, is changing the tags and the copy. For Ted airline, we sent different tags and copy to different parts of Chicago. People are starting to come up with some creative ideas. What if I had an idea tailored to different people based on where they live or who they are or what they do? Phil Dusenberry [former chairman of Omnicom Group's BBDO North America and a legendary creative executive] described it as a commercial that's 30 seconds long and a mile deep, which I think encapsulates the essence of what we do.
WSJ: Could one conceive of a situation where an advertiser and an ad agency would have to have someone on duty constantly to watch for opportunities to tweak an ad campaign? When you bring ad agencies in to discuss what you do, how do they react? Do they seem willing to consider such a model?
Mr. Haberman: Some look at it as a problem, and some look at it as an opportunity. Some agencies say, "I want to be in the business of running those dashboards [computer centers that manipulate how the ads are tweaked] because that's going to be serving clients." Some say, "We don't have anyone who can do this." So these changes, and these are not monumental changes, could be different depending on what people want to be and what they want their business to be.
量身定制电视广告 促使观众锁定频道
当电视节目主持人说，“别走开，广告过后马上回来”时，对于某些懒散在家守著电视的人来说，这就意味著可以换频道了。而如果赛思?哈伯曼(Seth Haberman)的创意得以推广，电视观众们将获得更多的新鲜感，让他们守著手里的频道不变。
哈伯曼担任总裁兼首席执行长的纽约公司Visible World设计了可供广告商将商业广告进行数字化广告调整的技术，让广告内容与电视观众更加贴近。有朝一日这种技术普及后，在棒球比赛中播放的啤酒广告将会提及正在比赛的球队，零售商可以在广告中组织每天的倒计时，计算著距离周末打折活动的日子，每天不断更新。
毫无疑问，这种思路将使广告行业的运作方式发生翻天覆地的变化，在创造性和设计上将翻开崭新一页。那么观众会感兴趣吗？广告代理商是不是要让它们的广告人员每天工作24个小时，每周工作7天，以保证他们的广告可以根据观众的突发奇想随时发生变化？以下是45岁的哈伯曼在接受《华尔街日报》采访时提供的一些思路。
《华尔街日报》：很多人在为30秒电视广告的没落痛苦不已。而你们的公司却在这种古老的促销方式上看到了生机。为什么？
哈伯曼：我从未看到任何互动活动会让你流泪。当你努力去控制一件东西的时候，它已经改变了你的思维。我有几个小孩，也曾经是一个视频游戏的程序设计者。我的小孩打游戏时，这些游戏里的英雄被打死上千次。没有任何感情色彩，只是一些发生的事情而已，没有悲伤，也没有真正的深层次的情感。而当你从一个级别升到另一级时，会出现一座小桥，他们会播放一个两分钟的电影，这种场景却往往会让我儿子热泪盈眶，因为这个英雄死在了桥上。400个小时的互动游戏未必能产生一个两分钟故事的效果。创造一个感情化的内容，捕捉观众中某个人与屏幕上某件事情的情感联系，这是一个被动叙事的行为，却也是互动环境难以产生的东西。如果你能够把握这一点，在你拟定市场营销的支出计划时，或者为你的程序设计投资计划时，你将更加游刃有余。
《华尔街日报》：如果电视商业广告能有其他替代形式的话，为什么这么长时间以来人们都无动于衷呢？
哈伯曼：如果你身处电视广告销售行业，你看到的是什么？你瞧，除了2001年以外，广告业务在逐年增长。至于电视广播，很明显观众人数越来越少，而广告商赚的钱却越来越多。如果你是该行业的一员，那么你的业绩一定不错。所有有关技术和该行业支离破碎的讨论，以及所有这些事情都和你无关。如果看看营销市场，看看电视广告支出在企业营销支出中的百分比，二十世纪七十年代，这一比例为50%-60%，而现在只有20%，从宏观角度来看，显然电视广告在丧失市场。而从策略上的微观角度来看，他们赚的钱却越来越多。因此你应该做的是什么呢--继续赚钱，继续思考为什么企业营销资金这么快地流入其他领域？对于一个广告销售人员，他可以底气十足地说，我的绩效仍然很好。如果你负责有线电视广告，你的业绩增长简直是突飞猛进。为什么我还要费神去思考那些根本不会影响我业务增长的事情呢？
《华尔街日报》：有销售目标或者特别产品的广告商似乎是你们这种服务的明显受益者，但这种技术还有其他用途吗？
哈伯曼：首先，它可以让广告直接面向目标客户。提供什么样的广告尽在掌握。广告与销售的联系越紧密，与库存的联系越紧密，或者与观众的联系越紧密，你取得的效果越好。其次，如果你的商品有具体的适用性，那么这种技术将为你提供广阔的推广空间。如果你卖的是微型客车，为什么说它有适用性呢？对于某些人而言，它的价值是能够载著小孩到处走。对于另一些人，可能在于安全性。而对于其他人，可能在于它的性能。你可以对他们量身定制广告。第三，我们认为这是一个产生创意的源泉，使得广告不再千篇一律。我们为Ted Airline在芝加哥的不同地区展示了不同标识和不同版本。一些创意应运而生。我如果可以根据不同地方、不同类型或者不同职业的人量身打造广告，这将是一件多么神奇的事情。Omnicom Group旗下BBDO North America前董事长将其称为“30秒长一英里深”的商业产品，这足以概括我们工作的精髓。
《华尔街日报》：是否会出现广告商和广告代理商进入一个不得不派人密切关注广告机会以在广告战中抢占先机的局面？当你们和广告代理商讨论你们的产品时，他们反应如何？他们看上去会采取这种方式吗？
哈伯曼：有些人认为这是个难题，有些人将其视为发展机会。一些代理商称，他们希望用一个电脑中心来控制广告的变化，以便更好地为客户服务。而另外一些代理商则表示，他们还没有做这项工作的合适人选。因此对于不同广告商，广告模式的改变也将有所不同，这将取决于他们在广告行业中希望扮演的角色以及他们的业务目标。
