Randy Kil­go­re, the new Chair­man of the Inter­ac­tive Adver­tis­ing Bureau, has been shar­ing his views on the future of dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing: there, he opines, “three fun­da­men­tal truths” which every­one involved in gen­er­at­ing online adver­tis­ing sales needs to be aware of. That’s not just adver­tis­ing sales man­agers and cre­atives, that’s every­one from the busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er to the search engine mar­ket­ing specialist.

Kil­go­re, who is chief rev­enue offi­cer at Tremor Video, suc­ceeds the for­mer IAB chair Peter Nay­lor (NBC News Digital’s Exec­u­tive Vice Pres­i­dent of Ad Sales). He believes that online adver­tis­ing “should be as much about insane cre­ativ­i­ty and sto­ry­telling as TV.”

Why touch, data and time matter

TV has sight, motion and sound to entice view­ers; but inter­ac­tive media throws in touch, an addi­tion­al — and very pow­er­ful – tool, he declared.  He went on:

“When some­one leans in to look at your ad, hits “play’ to see it a sec­ond time, opts in to see addi­tion­al con­tent or “likes’ your ad on Face­book, they are touch­ing your brand.”

But this is just the first of the fun­da­men­tal truths Kil­go­re has in mind. Just as impor­tant for the suc­cess­ful busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er is his sec­ond essen­tial truth: data.

Data by the petabyte

This of course is not espe­cial­ly rad­i­cal news for the job­bing busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er, who is knee-deep in the stuff much of the time. As Kil­go­re notes, there are petabytes of data com­ing in all the time (a sin­gle petabyte can hold around 58,000 HD movies or approx­i­mate­ly 13 years of pro­gram­ming). Putting it into con­text, he explained that Face­book stores about 100 petabytes of data. That’s one heck of a lot of it.

But, Kil­go­re says, sift­ing through the data “onslaught” is most def­i­nite­ly worth the effort. Some­where in that unwieldy data haystack, he argues, is “the mag­ic that can pro­pel the next ad, or the next Web series, to greatness.”

The third fun­da­men­tal truth? Time. Gen­er­al­ly, the more time poten­tial con­sumers spend with a brand, the bet­ter for busi­ness. Research from his own firm, Tremor, found that when a view­er engages with an online ad, pur­chase intent ris­es by 8 per cent.

Under his stew­ard­ship, Kil­go­re wish­es the IAB to shift dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing “from direct response met­rics to a pow­er­ful place to build brands.” It’s going to be an inter­est­ing tenure.