Applying the 'community' ideal to Web advertising

Business leaders in the Web advertising and network-building industries convened today at Fordham University to discuss how they can remake the Web advertising model so that it helps forge communities the way Web sites already do.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - While the metaphor of the Web typically invokes images of spreading out, the modern model of Web sites and services is actually more geared toward congregation -- building a community, and supporting it with a strong software platform. But that model applies generally to Web sites, destinations, portals as we've come to know them.

Advertising also has the task of reaching communities, and hopefully reaching them where they congregate. But can Web advertising take part in the act of congregation, of collecting people into a community and building brand presence around that? That was one of the subjects considered by a panel of executives this morning at a meeting at Fordham University of the Web 2.0 NY conference, a touring show sponsored by the marketing group iBreakfast Club.

The problem with ads, said one speaker, is that they're fixed in both form and function, and that reduces their viability. That one speaker is from someplace you might not have expected to hear those words from: He's Heath Row, the research manager at DoubleClick.

Content is wonderful because it can be bookmarked, Dugg, shared, blogged about, aggregated, Row said. But ads are static entities stuck in place for limited periods of time. They can disappear after two weeks or so, or they can get pulled without warning. So they have no presence, which is a requirement for both content and for representing the people who share that content.

Now, it's hard to imagine sharing ads willingly, but that's only if you assume an ad is a static thing, something to be clicked through. DoubleClick is developing a widget, revealed Row, whose aim will be to make advertising more usable like regular content, to endow it with the presence and functionality that display ads today typically lack...as well as the context that its prospective merger partner Google can apply to textual ads.

Of course, characterizing this item as a "widget" enables DoubleClick to remain stealthy about just what this piece of software actually will be, or where it would reside...or whether it will need Google's help in deploying it.

Web ad campaigns are more effective when you already know whom they address, and about who they are and what they like. That's the observation offered by Steve Ennen, who was hired just last month as Director of Business Development for Florida-based Neighborhood America. His company offers to help enterprises build their own social networks, purposefully limited in scope around the products and services their clients provide.

One example of NA's services Ennen offered was a community of Men's Health magazine readers whose mutual objective is to lose weight, and to do so by a set time. That community is called "Belly Up." Another was the "Brotherhood Campaign," built around the ideal of men supporting men, but also centered around brands: in this case, Adidas and the NBA.

Such campaigns, Ennen said, have the added advantage of being able to generate text messages on cell phones that aren't treated as spam, because they're accepted as coming from friends.

Craig Calder, the executive VP of business development at marketing firm Yovia, submitted that this type of social marketing would be critical to all business' plans in the coming years. To that end, his firm offers a kind of preparation service for clients that has a familiar sounding ring to it: social media optimization.

Paid search is the more relied upon monetization strategy today, Calder conceded, and it can be successful...up to a point. But that strategy only works to a point, he said, because over time, companies will find themselves paying more to obtain more unique users.

It's more important for companies to generate more "viral content," Calder said. That statement provoked even the panel's moderator, Center Networks blogger Alan Stern, to warn the crowd against putting too much faith in firms that promise to help make their clients' content "more viral."