Pay me per view

Pay Me Per View
By Paul A. Herbig

In a world where consumers are empowered to choose the content (and advertising) they view, a number of entrepreneurs are developing environments that "force" consumers, through a variety of incentives, to watch and recall advertising. Many consumers are highly skeptical of such schemes, They don't allow consumers to absorb messages in an natural environment. But they seem to be getting both consideration and test budgets from many leading marketers.

Ads.com. existed a few years ago and was the first property to devote an entire Web destination to advertising (and to consumers who love it). Its mantra was "all ads, all the time." Its rapid fall from grace and dramatic business failure spoke volumes about consumers' lack of interest in viewing marketing messages. But at least they tried and are to be considered by many to be the pioneer of continuous ads (“All Ads, All the time” would be their slogan if they were a radio station.)

Then came alladvantage.com, billing itself as "the nation's #1 employer."
It paid millions of consumers to surf and click on ads. Another crash and
burn. Two down and countless many more to go. Undaunted, a few new efforts are underway to pay consumers to watch video ads online. If viewers answer a few questions correctly about the ads (to ensure they take away the salient points), they get paid.

One such effort, which rewards consumers with 50 cents in their PayPal
accounts for each correctly retained commercial, is BrandPort.
The company has supposedly received test money from leading marketers who are seeing "tremendous results." Other companies also pay consumers (either in cash or with credits) to watch and retain ads.

One place where paying to view ads has been in existence for decades is the movie theatre. Moviegoers do not like this practice but it is common and many purposedly arrive later than the scheduled time just to miss the requisite advertising. This may cause you to throw popcorn at the screen, but a new study finds that in-cinema ads are effective. The results clearly demonstrate that consumers bond with brands they see advertised in-cinema, driving consideration and purchase intent, leading to brand trial and loyalty. Testing commercials across various categories — packaged goods, automotive, consumer electronics, apparel and fast food restaurants — the study found that moviegoers who saw in-theater advertising were 44% more likely to remember an ad than consumers who saw it on TV.

Additional findings comparing in-cinema advertising to traditional media:

* Moviegoers who saw cinema advertising are 70% more likely to correctly identify the advertised brands
* Moviegoers are nearly 70% more likely to be motivated by in-cinema ads
* Up to one week after seeing commercial at the movies, nearly half of consumers could name the specific brands they saw advertised
* Moviegoers are also more likely to exhibit increased interest in the advertised brands, have a better opinion of the brands and talk to others about a point brought out in the ad.

Several companies are already excited by the study. A recent announcement by Sony Ericksson mobile phones that it would dedicate a significant portion of its media launch to a theater-buy shows that the category has broken out of the candy advertisers that traditionally dominated this category. Advertisers like the ability to target a captive audience that
doesn't have channel zappers and to hit them with all of the potential offered by the big-screen media.

It looks like moviegoers are going to have to get used to looking at ads, whether they like them or not. When something works, everyone wants to use it. Moviegoers do not start panicking quite yet. Loews Cineplex Entertainment has found a compromise to meet moviegoers' wishes to have the actual start times of feature films, opting to note in movie listings that the movie will start 10 to 15 minutes after the published show time.

As we say in the marketing business, Point-counterpoint: Advertisers make their move, consumers counterpunch. A long battle that will never end.

Paul Herbig is the Managing Partner of Herbig Marketing Associates, (www.herbigandsons.com) a nationally renown marketing consulting company and former Professor Marketing and Dean, Ketner School of Business for Tri-State University. He can be contacted at mktgandme@aol.com.