Jumping the Gator
With Internet advertising already slogging through a brutal, insecure advertising market, the recent controversy over Gator.com and its "offer companion" banners has caused some understandable testiness in the industry. Kind of like somebody struggling to come back from heart trouble only to find out they've also developed gout. Maybe this is what caused the Interactive Advertising Bureau to get involved in such a nasty dust-up with Gator. But the success or failure of Gator isn't what's at stake: the bigger issue is that we're still an industry at war with ourselves over our identity. More on this below, but first a quick recap of the situation.
For those unaware, or who are now a bit rusty on the details, Gator.com offers a handy, client-side helper application that serves as a companion to the browser. You download the software (or get it as a companion app when you download something else &hellep; more on this later) and the Gator subsequently springs to life with helpful suggestions as you browse and shop online. (Rumor has it that it's really the now unemployed "Clippy" from Office '98 dressed in a gator suit, but that's just hearsay). While you're looking at the pages of an automotive site, your Gator might toss out a suggestion that you buy a certain kind of car, a suggestion that might happen to look a lot like an ad banner and might also happen to load right over the top of the existing banner.
"Piracy!"shouts the IAB. "You're taking over the browser and displacing the ad that's paying for that page to appear in the first place." Wrapping themselves in the banner - if you will - of liberty, the Gatorians assert, "the desktop belongs to the consumers &hellep; if they give us permission, we can put what we want on their screen." The IAB publicly rattles its legal saber. Gator sues the IAB outright. And the rumble is on.
The outcome is far from decided, but at its essence, Gator v. IAB should really be called Tech v. Media. When you listen to the IAB and the 4A's rail against Gator, they use media-based metaphors. "It's like they're taking a copy of my magazine and pasting their own ad over the one that I sold to the advertiser," says one wag. "It's the equivalent of intercepting the broadcast signal and inserting their own commercial," says another. These are people who see the world through a lens of media. While their claims against Gator may or may not be defensible, their reasoning ignores the uneasy cohabitation of media and technology.
The folks at Gator - whether they care to admit it or not - aren't in the media business at all. At quiet moments, their heads fill with images of desktops and hard drives. Gator comes from the land of applications. (In theory, it's not all that different from other client-side helper apps like those from All Advantage or Delta Click. The newly released Microsoft Passport promises the same kind of mobile data/registration experience.) The operating principle here is "If it can be done - and if we can get it installed - then it may be done."
Did the IAB overreact by threatening legal action and publicly dissing Gator? No and yes. Clearly the IAB couldn't be caught flat-footed and non-responsive to the perceived threat at such a critical transition period for the industry. As an advocacy organization, it's got to speak for its members, some of whom are pissed off at Gator. But by engaging in this public feud (many press releases later) the IAB has done more to sustain and promote Gator than to kill it. By taking to the barricades and suing the IAB, Gator has assured itself a great many news cycles yet to come.
So is Gator -- or any other helper application -- going to revolutionize the media business? In the end, no. But not because the IAB wins in court (whether they will or not is anybody's guess). Gator's three real enemies are consumer inertia, the fickle nature of its advertiser base and - ironically - technology.
Consumers don't download
As noted previously in Drift 2.3 ("Shrill Content"), most information consumers are pretty passive. To assume that zillions of them will download anything is a bet against logic. Gator probably recognizes that they've already secured their base of core, application-oriented users. So they're moving to an aggressive strategy of partner downloads; Gator is bundled with some other product the customer wants to put on his or her computer. But even though these second-generation users may be saying "Yes" to Gator during the download of something else (actually, a good portion of them are just saying "Next>") the connection with the application will just get thinner and thinner over time. If advertisers are interested today because Gator users are eager and focused and responsive, they won't be when the audience gets diluted and those qualities are no longer present.
Fighting the last war?
When you talk to the Gator people, they talk about the astonishing click rates they're getting for advertisers, and the eager batch of new customers they're signing up. But to the extent that they're focused on this dying metric, they'll lose in the long run. Clicking through on ads of any kind is an unnatural behavior. You may spike it in the short term, but it will always regress to the mean. The advertisers that Gator is signing up today will desert it quickly tomorrow when click rate crashes. The open questions are whether something that's application-driven can really contribute to more complex communication goals like brand building and retention, and whether Gator can change its spots in time. To Gator's credit, I believe they are looking down the field and thinking about these issues now. But selling clicks now and selling brand building later can be a mean transition, as about 5,000 existing sites can attest.
Live by technology
Both the consumer's use of the Internet and control of the domains they visit are consolidating. While consumers will use the Net more and more in the coming years, they won't surf: they'll choose a relative handful of sites and demonstrate increased loyalty (or inertia, perhaps.) At the same time, online media itself is also consolidating. Fewer and fewer companies will be serving up the content these consumers touch. So Gator has to survive in a confined space. So what if the dominant sites on the web just said "No" and figured out how to deploy a Gator-killer. "Sorry, but we can't let you look at Yahoo! or CNN unless you disable Gator &hellep; Click here to begin the process." Hey, it's the consumer's desktop, right? I'm not saying this is technically trivial, but my guess is it's far from impossible.
I still say, however, that the bigger case of Media v. Tech is far from settled. If you look at most of the major points of contention in the development of online advertising, Media v. Tech is lurking in the background. The rich media debate: media sensibility vs. technical exploration. Measurement: Projectable consumer research vs. complete reliance on technical tracking through log files. And so on.
Make no mistake: We are still an industry that's deciding what we're all about. Gator v. IAB is just a case in point.