The Idea of Sequential Advertising – Moving Beyond the Context

The growth of contextual advertising online was a major landmark in the growth of the Internet itself. It to my mind democratized the web like no other, giving opportunity for the smallest of web publishers, (while the big ones made acquisitions cool) breaking the stigma on text advertising and on a general note improving information spread on the web. Indeed it took online advertising to a whole new level from flashy banners and blue purple links that website owners pleaded their visitors to click to keep their site free. It also in a way led to YouTube, Blogger, perhaps Flickr all becoming the web 2.0 success stories as the leading online advertising machines hunted for more context within the content.

It’s been over 5 years now since contextual advertising really took off, which itself was 5 years after the biggest name in contextual Google took off, the decade of Google. And perhaps it is time for advertising to move beyond the context, not completely but relatively.

Now I am a big fan of using information and user intellect as a medium of advertising. That is to not pitch rather just present information when you want to promote your idea, brand, product or USP. This is also perhaps the reason contextual advertising worked in the first place. However, with the advent of CPA and CPL ways of working the whole idea of information spread limits itself to a only for conversion campaigns (which is not bad). The fallout of this is that a lot of potential leads (people who could be leads) don’t get through to the system, because the landing page is so well targeted, that they don’t have an avenue to additional information.

However, imagine a campaign which works in sequence. It satisfies a certain requirement of information, bait the user/reader to dig for more information, and then involve him enough to introduce the business side of the campaign. Let me put this in an example.

I hunt a lot for Photoshop tutorials online and naturally use Google to hunt for free tutorials. Now I can be a possible target for graphic and web design schools in India. However, I might not be looking for a course at that instant, and taking up a paid course might not even cross my mind then. So contextually I am a target, while at that situation I am not. I want a free tutorial and in the idea that I am talking about here, an institution will provide me a free tutorial and here begins the advertising sequence. Say I look for “how to make a banner ad?”, the contextual advertising will point me to a resource say “Sponsored link-All about web banner designing, hear what the experts say” and the link points to a page which has some of the best graphic designers talk about their banner ad creatives and small set of how-tos and a link to learn more about graphic designing. We haven’t advertised the service yet, we building it up this way. Showing the scope of a career in designing indirectly, building our credibility as people with access to the best, and at the same time offering the reader what he wants. We can use the design and text on the page to build a situation where I might want to know about a career in designing thereby giving scope for me to buy their service as it is in line with the information I am looking for.

The idea of sequencing information is to build the context and ensuring the context is correct, I think this will improve targeting.

This isn’t a radical concept of course, but it isn’t new either, but it is just the way contextual advertising became contextual advertising. For advertising has always been contextual, it just wasn’t targeted with the precision that PPC campaigns on websites and search engines gave. Similarly sequential advertising has been tried in various media and for that matter even on the web. I consider the Dell campaign on Taking Your Own Path a case in pertaining to this thought.

I beleive this kind of advertising, where we use the web’s forte which is to dispel information as the primary tool of advertising and create campaigns which aid the web users in finding information and thereby building both leads list and the brand as the way forward for online advertising. I admit to not keeping track of a variety of campaign trends as much as a blogger on online advertising should, but like I have mentioned before my judgment and opinions follow what I see and experience myself, and I believe this kind of advertising comples me to not be blind towards them and therefore effective.