March 14, 2006
Today with Rocketboom’s episode 349, the rules of advertising have changed forever. Rocketboom has created a new, spellbinding advertising format.
Rocketboom is an entertaining video-blog with a news-format that hundreds of thousands of people download every weekday morning at 9AM EST. I’ve been staying with them as they burn the midnight oil putting the finishing touches on the internet ad that ushers in a new era in advertising. I’ve watched the team of crackerjack media-makers, Andrew Baron, Amanda Congdon, Mario Librandi, and Kevin Chapados edit long into the night putting the finishing touches on their first episode with an advertisement.
It was only a month ago that they sold their first advertisement package on ebay. The highest bidder, an atm company, gets an advertisement put at the end of every Rocketboom for a week. Rocktboom gets complete creative control and retains the creative commons copyright on it and so if their client likes the advertisement and wants to show it on tv, they have to buy !
Today’s one minute advertisement shows up at the end of their 4 minute show and this is no ordinary advertisement. Normal television ads know that they have thirty seconds to get their message across. They have to rely on simple powerful messages that give a one-two punch to the audience’s reptillian brain.
Rocketboom changes all that. Because they are not limited to television’s thirty seconds, they have added subtlety and intruigue and a great narrative story to the advertisements that will make Rocketboom subscribers sit on the edge of their seats waiting for the next days advertisement. When people download Rocketboom every morning, they have the episode on their computer and the Rocketboom team have taken this advantage and scored a touchdown. They made a commercial where the idea is simple, but the story is full of intruiging and subtle details. If you want to get it, you just watch it once, but if you want to really get it, you have to watch it over and over for all the easter eggs and cool details that lie just below the surface.
Rocketboom can track how many times it’s downloaded, but there is no measure for the millions of times that people around the world will watch this commercial over and over again getting new subtle insights into the clever masterminds of Rocketboom’s creative team.
Advertisers, I speak to you when I say that your day has come. You are no longer bound to make your advertisements fit into the square holes of the old media. With video-blog advertisements your world has opened up and the creative possibilities are endless.
Advertisers, the time is now to go forth and find your favorite video-blog and pay creative people to make provoking narrative advertisements that people will watch over and over again. Now is the time to make the investment in video-blogs and internet media, while it is still fresh and the barrier to entry is low and the playing field is wide.
Crossposted by author from I Make Things
