Creativity is limitless. But knowing your limits creates innovative ideas.

If you were to have all the money in the world, what would you spend it on? I don’t think it’s an easy question to answer. Give me $10k, $500k, 1mill and I’ll reel off a shopping list for easy category – I have a limit. I think everybody is capable of great ideas, in many ways this is the easy part. But I believe the key to generating innovative executions, is in the deep understanding of the limits, the paddock you have to play in.

Apply this to online advertising. In responding to a client brief. A great brief offers detailed insights, target audience and clear objectives that provide us with boundaries to work within. You expect that they are S.M.A.R.T. and you hope the funnel isn’t too big or too small to filter your ideas and response. You have several ‘limitation buckets’ that are defined for you –

- The Client – their understanding and enthusiasm for digital, their budget, their previous success with online.

- Their Campaign objectives – ROI, CTR, CPA, - insert three letter acronyms here -

- Your resources and assets – your audience, your internal resources, skillsets, time.

And one more..
- Technology

One bucket I think is most undervalued, you are limited in technology. Understanding the limits of technology and how you can manipulate the online space is fundamental to being able to fully maximise your creative opportunities and produce innovative digital executions.

Online is no doubt the most complex of all media to understand. Changing standards, measurement metrics not always easy to interpret and of course the constantly evolving technology; from Adobe Air to Silverlight, the mobile evolution and the big wide world of widgets.

But too often, local players, through failed understanding of what is possible, a lack of willingness to challenge what has been done in the past, apply a cookie-cutter approach to online solutions, tried and tested executions, that rarely deliver on client objectives or deliver true value. I feel there needs to be more people actively seeking to understand and apply this technology in new, unique and relevant ways.

I don’t expect everyone will want to know the latest Web2.0 social-networking site, spend their days on a carousel between RSS feeds, Techcrunch, Friendfeed and Twirl, but overall I think there needs to be a greater demand by those in the local online ad industry to understand and apply what is possible.

Check Orange’s ‘The World’s first internet balloon race’, a clever, unique execution which will no doubt deliver on Orange’s objectives above and beyond. And it’s not always about thinking large. NDM’s very own prized possession, the news.com.au homepage, offer up 14% of your above-the-fold pixels to advertisers via a medium rectangle and banner.

Forget the IAB terminology of ‘display ads’, we’ve got an interactive canvas, opening up opportunities for a conversations, engagement and interaction. And I hope through increasing the understanding and the limits of this technology, we can drive innovative, creative ideas that push forward local online advertising.

Over the over the page (OTP) advertising

I see over-the-page ads as the nearest format we (online) have to a TV commercial, interrupting our regular programming with a forced advertiser message.

It’s a short-term shotgun approach to online advertising, agencies love them because they provide reach, publishers love them because they provide super CPM rates. Users hate them. If you ask a novice user what is “online advertising”, they’ll often mention these ads. In a digital world that offers so much, it’s a shame we still have to resort to these formats.

Like watching a great TV commercial, there are OTP’s that generally make good viewing (see Soap’s Jumper launch, great example of online specific video done well) however a majority are poor flash projects that add little value or fully exploit the medium. Red flags also to Virgin Money and Sony, who both have over-zealous marketers running over-the-page style advertising on their own sites. Crazy.

What’s made worse if their lack of standardisation – in size, in duration, in mandatory inclusions. Ninemsn allow up to 10 seconds for a full page OTP, a lifetime in online. The IAB goes further offering maximum 15 seconds. And there is no mention of ad frequency, as publishers continue to bump up their frequencies from one a month, to one a week, to frequency of one throughout a week. I’m sure the usability departments in all of these publishers have fought and lost the war when it comes to these formats – too much revenue at stake.

But it’s a short term strategy, he who wins the user, wins the game. Users can and will move, when competitors are only one click away. As RSS and News feed widgets continue to gain in popularity, back door entry to publishers content via these links will become increasingly popular, effectively avoiding the homepage onslaught.

As Dr Schmidt highlights, while Google’s astronomic revenue is derived from their advertising model, the “number one priority is end-user happiness”. Publishers needs to get smarter about their ad units and return more focus to the user.