The Challenge: Paid streaming services are gaining in popularity, making interactive ads the new norm for TV. Marketers need to respond by integrating interactivity across channels.
With the advent of interactive ads on streaming services Hulu and MSN Video Player, viewers can engage TV ads with the simplicity and immediacy of online ads. With viewers growing accustomed to interactivity, one-way ads are quickly becoming a thing of the past.An increasing number of TV viewers are streaming content through gaming devices like Sony’s PlayStation 3 or Microsoft’s Xbox. (Every month, Xbox users watch 300 million hours of video on the platform.) These devices are rich with opportunities to interact. With the imminent release of NUads, Microsoft’s interactive ads platform for Xbox Live, it’s time for marketers to take note.
Many Xbox Live channels, including Crackle and Live.fm, are already ad-supported. So far, these have been static audio and video advertisements.
Here is how marketers can prepare for the transformation:
With online ads, social media and, now, interactive video, every ad can be an opportunity to interact. As a result, selecting images and drafting ad copy is no longer enough. Marketers need to give customers a way to interact with ads, rather than passively viewing them.
Don’t add poll questions or share buttons to ads just for the sake thereof. As Chris Hall wrote at Pocket-lint, “Interaction will come down to how clever advertisers are.” If you aren’t building creative interactions, you’re just adding an additional step between users and the content they’re trying to watch. Successful interactivity will require more.
While NUads and platforms like Hulu have enabled interactivity on standard television commercials, that doesn’t mean interactivity should be limited to TV. The top-performing social media advertisers give users ways to engage on Facebook and Twitter. And given new customer expectations, corporate websites can no longer be static.
