According to Yahoo!, the next big opportunity in online advertising will be the introduction of digital memories. Their research suggests people would want to remember and act on advertisements, but far too often life intervenes and the ad is lost. By giving people the possibility to save an ad and come back to it at a better time, conversion rates could increase.

Every day we make choices on what to deal with right away and what to postpone. Yet when we come across an interesting ad, you can only choose to act on it right there and then or lose it forever. Yahoo’s research points out attempts are made by interested people to get the ad back.

Almost 9% of the respondents (UK) declare to make print screens or copies of advertisements for later use or to share with someone else. Others revisit or refresh the webpage, visit the brand’s website or use search-engines, but some of these potential customers still remain unsuccessful in retrieving the information/offer seen in the original advertisement.

Digital Memories to the rescue!

Digital Memories could help potential customers to retrieve the ads at a later point in time. A Digital Memory would work by giving people the options to send an ad to an email address, a mobile phone, share it on social networks or save it in a user’s profile.

These options could be triggered by the click of an icon, as illustrated in the image on the right. It’s a relatively small change, which could significantly increase your advertisements conversion rates.

However

The implementation of this functionality is dependent on (at least) one of several parties. It could, for example, become a part of your advertisement or the advertising space. The value will differ per solution, which brings us to the underlying question in Yahoo’s theory: How do we as an industry take on these new developments and opportunities in a way that’s both beneficial to consumers as well as advertisers? Because, as in advertising, the solution needs to make the customer feel empowered.