The Marriage of TV and the Web

Shiv Singh, head of digital at Pepsi, makes some points I agree with (and a few I don't) in his thoughts about the future relationship between TV and the web. One I'm with him on is this: "When TV ads become teasers for digital experiences, the ROI on the investment will improve significantly as the digital experience will stretch out the brand experiences beyond the 30 second clip.. The ROI won't be measured by the impact that the TV ad has when it's aired but also by its residual influence on engagement in other mediums in the weeks that follow the airing." I think this is going to spell a big change for the agency landscape and spell the first real opportunity for digital shops to bite off a larger piece of the advertising pie. Also reminds me of something one of my favorite internet thinkers, Duncan Watts, wrote a few years ago about how brands could use "viral":

Imagine, for example, that an advertising firm makes a standard ad buy on the Web, or directs TV viewers to a Web site, or uses an e-mail list to contact potential consumers directly. Regardless of the method used, the campaign will yield some large number, N, of conversions—people who are sufficiently interested to click on the Web ad or embedded link. Traditionally, that’s all it would be expected to achieve, but imagine now that these N viewers can also share the ad easily with anyone else. In other words, what would previously have been the entire audience for the message also becomes the big seed for a viral campaign in which the newly added people can forward the message to their friends, who may forward it to their friends in turn, and so on.

Thought Watts is a lot more academic, the point is the same and the science is simple: If you have a big enough seed, your odds of seeing something catch fire is higher.