Last night the AICP had it’s annual showing of the awards reel here in MN.  The show is co-sponsored by MOMA in New York, and titled “The Art and Technique of the American Commercial”.  It was a great reel, filled with impressive creative work as always.  I’ve seen it every year since they started the show back in 1991.

But this year was different.  The AICP decided a few years back to consider any advertising, regardless of it’s intended media platform.  So this year, for the first time, the majority of the work included in the show was not meant for traditional Broadcast TV.  Each year, over the past few years, there has been more and more work that was recognized which was produced for distribution in theaters or on web sites.  These pieces are usually longer than the traditional :30 or :60, and feel more like short films.  The longer format allows for a richer story to be told, and a deeper engagement with the subject.  This is clearly an advantage for communicating with an audience, and shows how the marketing efforts of Brands and organizations will be presented in the future.

I have written before about the eroding efficacy of traditional “push” marketing on TV.  One wonders why so many advertisers are still relying on that method, but that’s another subject.  What this year’s AICP reel shows us more clearly than ever, is that if one wishes to engage an audience with work that is “best-in-class”, one has to think in terms of longer formats than the traditional :30.  Many of the winning entries ranged from :90 to over 4 minutes, with the median being around 2 minutes, (which seems to be a good length for the average viewer’s attention span).  And since it is impractical for most marketers to buy time on TV or cable channels of that length, this means, by extension, that the media distribution is going to shift to the web.

I see this as a positive development for the audience.  We’ll all have better, and more engaging videos to watch, and they will be more relevant to our interests in a “pull” environment.  Which is not to say that advertisers won’t still try to force you to watch what they want you to see (pre-rolls and mid-rolls in longer form entertainment), but those efforts will inevitably be defeated by technology which will allow viewers to create their own viewing experience.

Standouts from the show included the animated film produced by Chipotle last year, “ Back To The Start”, which was included in multiple categories.  It’s a great example of the new marketing paradigm.  I wrote a post about it when it was first released.  There was also a trio of pieces from Google, who’s Creative Lab put together some of the most moving short films ever, like “Dear Sophie” and “It Gets Better” under the campaign idea that the web is what you make of it.  Hallmark was also represented, as they have often been, this time with a lovely piece of realistic CG animation called “Motherbird”, about having a daughter.

And then there were the hilarious films by K-Swiss featuring Kenny Powers.  In the case of those films, the length may have been a bit too long (at 5 minutes), but the level of profanity was astonishing.  I’m sure folks at the FCC were freaking out when they got a look at that campaign, which proves that the web is truly unregulated in terms of the nature of the content.  There’s no way that would have ever been allowed to run on commercial TV.  Since I have kids that are often on-line watching video, I have mixed feelings about that issue.   But there are good child filters out on the market for those that want to protect young ears and eyes from “adult” humor.

Some of these outstanding examples of communication were new to me, since they were never distributed on commercial TV.    And that’s the way I expect it’ll be from now on.