Taipei Times: How will new media applications such as 3G affect the way advertisers get their messages to consumers?
Keith Reinhard: I hope that as we go forward that we'll see people putting media first because so much of the approach is based on a simple media world with three television channels and seven magazines, but the world has changed now. With television, selling became telling. You listen and I talk which is a very unnatural way of exchanging goods and services. Now with the interactive devices -- soon to be wireless and handheld -- the ads of the future in many ways will look more like video games because we will engage you.
TT: You've written about the need to integrate new media with brand and creative strategies in advertising. How will this become apparent?
Reinhard: In order to get your brand and its message in front of the consumer it will be embedded in the program content. Now Hallmark has its own channel. More brands are getting embedded into programming content. We're seeing this happen now.
Three nights ago in the US, Victoria Secret had a one-hour fashion show. Is that advertising? Is it media? Is it entertainment? Is it content? The answer is yes to all. It's easy for me to imagine in the US that Anheuser-Busch will have a satellite channel and there will be a menu of options that will look like a TiVo screen so you can select sports, comedy and music. [TiVo is a video device that automatically tracks and digitally records TV programs and edits out commercials.]
Anheuser-Busch would be the portal channel that you would log into. And then I think we'll get back to the kind of integration that was taking place in the industry in the 1960s and we were doing integrated and television and radio before that. You couldn't tell where the commercial began and the program ended; it was all woven right into the plot.
I think it can go to the point where advertisers are making movies. That's the great positive development of all the new technologies. The consumer, the viewer, is absolutely in charge. It is no longer the advertiser forcing something on you so that you have to go through this in order to get to the program material.
With the advent of TiVo and other personal video recorders people will choose to omit all commercials. They'll delete them. So it has to be good enough that you choose to engage.
That means there are commercials that are so good that you'll want to see them. And you'll log on to a website or interactive television and you'll say I want to go see the commercials. But if we embed our brand in content it has to be so good you elect to go. It changes the dynamic from advertiser's choice to consumer's choice.
TT: With heightened sensitivities to US foreign policy after the Sept. 11 attacks and the subsequent strikes in Afghanistan, how will US advertisers reach across cultural divides to sell their products?
Reinhard: The blurring of US foreign policy, US global expansion and US entertainment products are all one in the eyes of many people outside the US. So it's encumbered upon us to try to become more understanding of their values and celebrate and affirm those even as we do not withhold the real benefits of globalization. That's going to be a real challenge and a lot of people are talking about it, especially now after 9/11.
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