Dispatches
business
The Incredible Shrinking Ad
As our attention shifts to mobile phones—and their smaller screens—ads are becoming vastly less efective. And companies built on ad revenues, like Google and Facebook, should start to sweat.
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By Derek thompson
n J u ly 1 , 1941, baseball fans watching the Brooklyn Dodgers game on WNBT witnessed a breakthrough in marketing. For 10 long seconds, before the first pitch, their black-and-white screens showed a fxed image of a clock, superimposed on a map of the United States. A voice-over, from the watchmaker Bulova, intoned: “America runs on Bulova time.” It was the frst ofcial TV advertisement in U.S. history. And it was pretty lousy. As anyone who watched the Super Bowl knows, TV advertising has evolved
24
march 2013
t h e at l a n t i c
from frozen images and voice-overs to stories so entertaining that we occasionally shush each other in order to hear them. But the first ads on TV weren’t even TV ads. They were a mash-up of radio and print hallmarks—a slice of audio, a single image—served to an audience that was shifting to television. The history of afordable news and entertainment in America is, in many respects, a chronicle of advertising’s successful shifts from one medium to the next. After the Civil War, the coincident rise of cities and department-store advertising budgets pushed newspaper circulations skyward. Radio achieved its cultural peak in the 1930s and ’40s, not long after “national advertising came
into its own as a corporate entity,” says the American-culture historian Jackson Lears. Television’s deep insinuation into our culture might never have happened without a second 20th-century advertising renaissance, centered on the boxes in our living rooms. “We’re in the midst of something similar today with our phones,” Lears told me recently. “Advertising must come to terms with a new technology.” Now, in the opening innings of the mobile revolution, about half of American adults own a smartphone. But if television was once known as the “small screen,” smartphones are the smallest, allowing mere inches of marketing space. From an advertiser’s perspective, this has proved problematic. Mobile ads are generally inefective today, and the ad rates companies are willing to pay are minuscule. Mobile platforms, from phones to tablets, now command onetenth of our media attention, but only one one-hundredth of total ad spending. That represents a $20 billion gap, and an unmistakable message for tech companies: either the mobile-ad revolution is coming, or our attention has fnally escaped to a space where efective advertising cannot follow. This may seem like good i l lust r at i o n by k e v i n va n a e lst