Advertisments on Times Square can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but still space is scarce and impossible to get. While advertisers pay to get their ads on Times Square, you are unknowingly helping them spread their ads all over the world.
As a result of the growing popularity of consumer-generated pictures, videos and e-mail messages on Internet sites like YouTube and Myspace, advertisers are getting consumers to essentially do their jobs for them.
One way that advertisers are able to balance the cost of advertising at Times Square is that advertisments at that location aren’t limited to that location any more.
“What happens in Times Square is no longer strictly the province of location. You can experience things that are happening there, even if you’re not there.”
This of course is done by tourists that share pictures through Flickr, videos through Youtube, and so on. So while advertisers are paying for advertisements on Times Square, they factor in the fact that you will help their ads propagate all over the world through social media technologies.
The New York Times has more on the (free) Long Tail of advertising.
Originally posted on December 13, 2006 @ 2:12 pm
Chris P. says
I love this concept, especially from an advertiser’s perspective. The one thing that bothers me, though, is that with all of this user generated content, it’s impossible to determine the true reach of an ad once you’ve put it out there.
Needless to say, you’re getting more than just the ad space that you’ve paid for—that is, until the agencies selling the ad space begin to charge a premium based on location.
All this does is drive up the property value. Advertisers will inevitably end up paying more for these additional, “new media” eyeballs.
Unfortunately, they’ll have no way to reliably measure the reach outside of those folks who actually saw the ad in person.
The more I think about this, though, the more it really makes sense. Advertising is just becoming more efficient, so while you used to hit 30 MM consumers in Times Square (thanks to ESPN, MTV, ABC, etc.), perhaps now you hit 31 MM thanks to new media.
Now I’m left wondering—how much will the price of the ad space go up?