SmartWool, one of the first to try Flipboard Storyboards. (Photo credit: Flipboard)
Flipboard today launched a new advertising product called "Storyboard" that promises to allow users of its popular magazine-style media reader to dive deeper into the advertising, if they want to. Users can "flip right" or "flip left" to get more information, video feeds, and other branded content right in one ad. It's like our purchase-funnel compresses Awareness, Consideration, and perhaps even Purchase, all in one place.
It's like a living, breathing print ad.
Old days, meet new days.
In the old days, advertisers ran "print ads" in physical magazines. There were "innovations" like gatefolds that pulled out for added creative impact, or like running two or more print ads in different regions of the same national publication hoping to increase relevance. The "metrics" were more often than not based around Awareness and even those were not measuring individual ads but campaigns in the aggregate via brand tracking studies.
As advertisers got more sophisticated they started including a call to action of some sort in the print ads. Visit the store today or call this 800#. A call-to-action helped advertisers measure results, but never in realtime.
Then the Internet happened and "click through" became the call-to-action of call-to-actions. It was revolutionary because now our potential customers didn't even have to leave their seat, let alone their house to get more information about our brands. Yet the fact remained that even "click through" necessarily meant stopping whatever you were doing on your PC, your tablet or smartphone and entering a whole new web site via Chrome or even bouncing to another app.
It sounds super easy on paper - just click through and get more information! - but as we've become more and more dependent on our computers and mobile devices and multitasking is the norm, focusing and accomplishing have become real problems with endless tempting distractions literally a click away.
As such, what looks super easy on paper - just click through and get more information! - is now laced with second thoughts around productivity. We're afraid of getting kidnapped and off task.
Flipboard Storyboard eliminates second thoughts.
With Storyboard, the user can be tempted by an ad and learn more without leaving the Flipboard app. I believe this seemingly small feat (on paper) will be huge for advertisers.
Here's how Flipboard describes Storyboard in their press release:
Flipboard Storyboard, a vehicle for both brand and editorial storytelling, will be presented as beautiful, full-bleed multipage carousel. Readers can swipe from right to left to follow a full story, introducing a new gesture on the platform. Flipboard's proprietary algorithms extract branded content from multiple URLs and beautifully stitch individual items—ranging from articles, images, animated .gifs, video, and audio—together allowing brands to compose a complete narrative. This also means advertisers can run a Storyboard with existing creative assets, rather than creating new or unique content.
Combined with Flipboard's proprietary Interest Graph technology, advertisers are able to target campaigns to readers based on their interests and deliver multimedia brand content in a relevant context like never before.
From a business standpoint, what this means to me is that readers will more likely slide gracefully through our purchase funnels because psychologically engaging with these Storyboards is not multitasking. It's still one "task," Flipboard. Further, the fact these Storyboards can be targeted and, in so doing, made relevant to what the readers are interested in integrates our advertising into the user's singular experience. No digital kidnapping going on here.
I like it, Flipboard. I like it a lot.
