Online Advertising Categories

Recently we have been working on a lot of flash games at Soap. You can call these advergame, branded entertainment, brand games brames whatever but the fact is that online advertising seems to be far more valuable to the consumer than any other form of advertising. In fact the only thing traditional advertising is good for is funding free content. There would be no American Idol without advertising.

When I look at online I see these major trends in categorization of how brands advertise online.

- Plain Advertising: Product message here and buy now
- Entertainment: Hey enjoy this piece of content created by Brand X
- Useful: Here's an application or service that will help you. Created by Brand X
- Social: Chat about a topic related to brand X on a platform sponsored or brought to you by Brand X

On most traditional advertising mediums such as radio, TV and print you usually just got "Plain Advertising". But with digital there is a heavy shift away from this.

The added bonus is that with online you can do all 4 categories in the one solution.

I feel bad for traditional advertising people who provide no real worth to any of their consumers. They just sell stuff to people who don't need it. As interesting as the 90 second epic TV (read short film) is it'll be forgotten once the media campaign is over. Where as with online you have a chance to affect peoples behavior and have them using your solution for years to come.

Now I need to think of examples of where this happened. Nike+ seems a good example, various online communities from brands have done well too. I'll follow this up with examples once I have had time to think.