Advertising in the Age of Interactive

Sept 29, 2008

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For advertisers, every new medium brings with it new opportunities. Print introduced text and visuals, radio brought sound, and television represented a giant step forward with the moving image. But the Internet is unique. It brings together every component that came before it-audio, still images, text and video-while introducing its own, interactivity. The result? A quantum leap in both the art and science of advertising.

    "One of the signal transformations of interactive media is that they break down many of the barriers among and between different forms of content," says Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. "That raises the bar on expectations" for advertising, not just among marketers but also among consumers.



    The MIXX (Marketing and Interactive Excellence) Awards are the premier recognition of those marketers, agencies and publishers who embody the spirit of interactive advertising, who show how interactive media can be used to create effective marketing content that is not just a tolerable interruption but the kind of entertainment or information that consumers seek out.
    
    "All other awards and honors in the interactive space tend to look toward creativity as an isolated value in and of itself, or look to effectiveness isolated. But what we're trying to do is look at the totality of user experience in agreement with marketing goals and objectives-creativity and effectiveness," says Rothenberg.
    
    "As the IAB, we're the defining institution of interactive advertising. We're the industry body that interactive publishers, interactive agencies and marketers have accorded responsibility for defining what works, how it works and what should work, to identify and communicate emerging practices and note when those practices have become best practices," says Rothenberg.

    

"The MIXX Awards are a big part of that." Since their inception in 2005, the MIXX Awards have honored the best marketing efforts of the interactive age, a time when the bar has been raised across the board. The winners tell the story of an industry changed for the better by new possibilities and the practitioners who bring them to bear.

    "I think this would be the most amazing time ever in the history of advertising to be a creative in an ad agency," says Rothenberg. "The height of creativity in 1985 was an incredibly well-produced, expensive, 30-second spot. Now you have at your disposal tools and opportunities that were never ever available in the history of advertising. You can speak directly to the audience and have them speak directly back to you, and you can see in real time how that audience is reacting, and you can change it in real time."

    "This" he says, "is what makes advertising a much more fulfilling enterprise than ever before."
    
    Part of the fulfillment of working in interactive advertising comes from being part of a dynamic interactive ecosystem, an extensive community of publishers, marketers and agency specialists. So this year, for the first time in its history and perhaps the first time in the history of interactive advertising awards, the IAB convened a MIXX Awards jury comprising not just marketers but also agency executives and publishers.



    "One of our mantras is, 'It's all about the ecosystem,'" says Rothenberg, "so this year we decided we'd better drink our own bathwater and create a mixed judging panel." The result was a judging process in which the collected wisdom of the entire interactive ecosystem was brought to bear.

For more IAB Mixx Awards Coverage:
Advertising in the Age of Interactive
2008 Awards Guide
Why Mixx Matters