Advertising is a competition for attention.
This is why, wherever we seem to focus our gaze, there is often a commercial message.
For a long time a guaranteed way to reach a large number of people at the same time was television advertising. One episode of Coronation Street, in 1987, reached over 26 million people.
Today things are different. Increasingly people use streaming services rather than watch live TV. Spotting an opportunity to increase revenue Netflix is to launch a new ad-supported tier – called Basic – for subscribers willing to watch around five adverts per hour in exchange for a lower monthly cost.
“Basic with Ads represents an exciting opportunity for advertisers — the chance to reach a diverse audience, including younger viewers who increasingly don’t watch linear TV, in a premium environment with a seamless, high-resolution ads experience,” the company explains.
It is not a big leap for a company in the television business to look to advertising for more revenue.
But increasingly brands in other sectors are waking up to the opportunity to monetise their users’ attention too.
Uber, the ride hailing app, is now also entering the advertising business.
‘Journey Ads’, as the company calls them, will soon be displayed to users within the app.
“We have a global audience of valuable, purchase-minded consumers who, as part of our core business, tell us where they want to go and what they want to get,” explains Dr. Grether at Uber’s advertising division.
“While these consumers are making purchase decisions and waiting for their destination or delivery we can engage them with messages from brands that are relevant to their purchase journeys.”
Amazon is not often thought of as being an advertising business. But the company generates a staggering $40 billion a year in ad sales, mostly from the sponsored listings that take prominent positions in the search results when users are looking for a product to buy.
“This is starting to shake the duopoly that has dominated the digital advertising world for the past 15 years. Google and Meta generated a combined $325bn of advertising revenue last year,” observes Richard Waters at the FT.
“The search for new forms of targeting means any business with a significant reserve of first party data — information about its own customers that can be freely used for honing advertising — could be well-placed. As advertising analyst Eric Seufert puts it: these days, everything’s an ad network.”
