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Into Stitials
Jeffrey F. Rayport
If youre familiar with consumer-brand marketing, you know the term
interstitial. An interstitial ad is one that appears in intersticesthat is,
between segments of the content that customers want to experience. Like
a tollbooth on a turnpike, it forces customers to stop and pay (in the form
of time and attention) before proceeding on their desired path. Epitomized
by the 30-second TV spot, its a concept that captures what advertising
has been designed to do in the past, and why customers today go to such
lengths to block, skip, zap, or fast-forward past it.
Advertising is now universally acknowledged to be broken, but the need
for it obviously still exists. Making it effective again will require radically
altering our perspective on the interstitial. Instead of choosing from the
available slots between segments of media, marketers must turn the ageold formula on its head. Its high time to focus not on avails in media but
on those in consumers daily liveswhere, when, and how people might
prove receptive to relevant commercial messages. Were not talking
anymore about interstitials. Were talking about what I call vivistitials.
Heres a vivistitial example youve probably already experienced:
Captivate Network. Now a unit of Gannett, Captivate is a decade-old
company that quietly delivers more advertising impressions to an affluent
urban professional demographic than USA Today and CNBC combined. It
does this by displaying specialized video programming on screens
mounted in the elevators of upscale office buildings. The inspiration
behind it was the recognition that elevator rides are dead airand
sometimes even pain pointsin peoples lives. Elevators are socially
awkward environments that fail to promote human interaction; they
induce otherwise self-assured individuals to look at their feet and fidget
with their keys. Captivates screens give peoples eyes a welcome place to
rest: on visually rich and relevant information such as headlines and
images from the days news, stock quotes, and weather. And, yes,
adjacent ad messages. For those who can put their minutes in the
elevator to better use, the screens are easily ignored, since they are small
and dont emit a sound. But for most riders the screens are highly
effective instruments for information delivery. Is it any surprise that recall
of Captivate ads is two to four times higher than that of commercial spots
on broadcast TV?