What comes after the 30-second ad?

Financial Times

For years, the 30-second television spot has been the bread and butter of the advertising industry, creating hundreds of billions of dollars in value, said John Gapper. “But the traditional ad is in trouble.” The format, created for breaks between shows, hasn’t translated online. Despite initially high hopes that online video would let advertisers target niche audiences, the reality is that “irritated viewers” skip past online ads at the first opportunity. And they are getting more help: By year’s end, Google will stop allowing 30-second ads to run on YouTube unless they can be skipped. Yet advertisers cling to the format because it’s familiar. They also make the mistake of assuming

low production values will cut it online; advertisers spent seven times more creating video spots for TV last year than for online, even though digital advertising is now a bigger market. Or they go too far in the opposite direction. At this year’s Cannes Lions, the ad industry’s “annual festival of self-congratulation,” one of the winners was a three-minute-long commercial for a Gillette razor designed for senior caregivers. It was “a delicately filmed and moving narrative,” but who has time to watch three minutes on a razor? The traditional video ad needs a “sturdy successor” for the digital era. It was “a perfect invention for its time; the creatives must create another.”