Yan Pritzker photographer, entrepreneur, software engineer, musician, skier

Hulu’s long form ads and the future of pull advertising

Posted 2 March 2009 @ 10am | Tagged analysis, thoughts

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Hulu is testing a new feature which lets you select whether you want the regular 30 second spots spaced throughout the show you watch, or one long (2 minute) clip from one sponsor. Here’s why I think this is a great move:

• 30 second spots interrupt you right as you’re watching a show so your annoyance factor is high.
• With a 2 minute spot, the advertiser has to work to capture your attention. This is a key aspect. One recent commercial I saw was a 2 minute short film about Honda racing. The film was actually relatively interesting to watch and a lot more palatable and engaging than a 30 second spot involving jingles and a radio announcer voice.
• The 2 minute spot will give advertisers more creativity to deliver content that is actually interesting to users, rather than resorting to traditional 30 second spot limitations of drilling messages into your brain.
• I am more likely to associate a positive experience with a brand if they’ve earned my respect. By showing me an interesting clip and then leaving me at peace to watch my show, the brand wins.

I found one blog that claims an 88% response rate in favor of the 2 minute ads. They also talk about how it would be potentially hard for advertisers to come up with good content, making a point that a 2 minute long commercial about Wal-Mart may be hard to swallow. This is a Good Thing. Advertisers should work for our attention. If they can’t muster up an interesting 2 minute clip, then they don’t deserve our attention.

The age of push marketing is coming to a rapid close as our primary content delivery method shifts to the Internet and on-demand technologies. We’re not going to sit there and wait for our shows to come on, we’re just going to click a button and watch what we want, when we want.

But we need to make ads just as pullable as we do our content. If I’m gonna have to watch a 2 minute ad, why shouldn’t I choose which ad I want to see? If I’m presented with 2 or 3 choices I might click on an 2 minute long ad about rock climbing because I’m really into that, or a funny short advertising The Office, but I’m not really into shopping at Wal-Mart so I’m going to ignore that one whether they like it or not. With pull advertising, the publishers also get my attention data, because I chose to watch their ad over several others. They get data about how they’re doing demographically, and they get data about how they stack up against competitors.

Hulu would also get an interesting idea about advertising demographics and determine ad popularity. Eventually they could use this data to figure out which ads people would like based on ads they’ve watched in the past and attention data from the rest of the community. This could usher in a new age of advertising where crappy uninteresting ads float to the bottom and out of sight, creating a competition for quality of ads by the publishers.

When the ad content gets interesting, user attention is captured, users aren’t annoyed by bad and irrelevant ads, everybody wins.

Great bit! I agree, it comes back to the simple fact, great content will always receive a return, crap content,, not so much,, even if it’s a commercial.

I sat for the ridiculously long gatorade “G” bit that uses the holy grail. Amazing for the simple fact they got all those people in the same place at the same time, and mildly funny. Long form is a great way to pull together what could seem like a disjointed ad campaign, by showing bits and pieces and having them come to your site to “put it all together”.