Advertisements are annoying because they interrupt whatever it is that I’m trying to do. Ads disrupt my reading, my hulu-watching, steal attention when during searches and force you to chase your mouse around a dancing logo hunting for the ‘x’ icon. I cannot recall a time when associating your brand with words like annoying and frustrating was a good thing.
We are in a flow when we’re reading. Researcher danah boyd talks about Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory in the context of media online:
Consider what it means to be “in flow” in an information landscape defined by networked media, and you will see where Web 2.0 is taking us. The goal is not to be a passive consumer of information or to simply tune in when the time is right, but rather to live in a world where information is everywhere. To be peripherally aware of information as it flows by, grabbing it at the right moment when it is most relevant, valuable, entertaining, or insightful. Living with, in, and around information.
boyd is not talking about advertisements here. Not directly at least, but it fits in. Usually, ads are persuading their targets to buy something. Usually. But, often, people do come online, to indeed, purchase something. The advertisements are frustrating when people are not shopping or the advertisements are irrelevant. The ads are frustrating when they don’t fit into our flow and rarely do they.
Example: If Cheryl Sundra has been shopping for cameras lately, I bet she would love to know that Kyle Telechan uses a Nikon D3. She thinks his photo is “fantastic!”
But for now, advertisements are a part of our world. Some news companies especially still cling to the ad model for a way to pay for server space and their reporters. But how is it that an entire industry built on paying for their product with subscriptions and ads missed the boat again?
According to insidefacebook.com:
Facebook has filed for an ad targeting patent that lets the company direct ads based on the tastes of a a user’s friends, on top of their own explicit interests.
But it also covers other twists on the idea, including using a person’s browsing habits or actions on the social network to target ads. Although the patent document only appeared earlier this month, the company filed for it in April of last year.
Facebook argued in the filing that self-reported interests often leave out people who might fit within a targeted group for an advertiser. The idea would be to help marketers reach potential customers who haven’t shared enough information about themselves to feed Facebook’s ad targeting algorithms.
Educated, connected readers, probably with credit cards, are reading the news online. Sure, the news sites has access to user browsing habits. But that was when they were just users. Facebook transformed these users into people. People with relationship histories, favorite restaurants and absolute easy access to the kinds of people and places that are important in their lives.
Facebook filed for this patent. But surely the news is already working on something. I’m personally putting a lot of eggs in the news.me basket.
3 replies on “What if ads weren’t such a bad thing?”
You’re onto something with the Nikon-his photo is fantastic thing. I love advertising when I SEARCH for it, when I see something cool and I’m like “what is that chair that actor is sitting on in my favoite tv show? I want it!” I actually read the back of fashion magazines where they put the full details of where to buy the clothes you see in ads. Make what you’re selling look so good and so cool I seek out the information.
You were right when you said you prefer product placement to advertising.
Providing ads relevant to the reader/viewer/user has been the challenge of marketers for years. The problem as you mentioned is putting product X in front of the person when they need to see it.
Ultra-targeted ads, like Facebook ads, are moving in this direction. I recently used Facebook to advertise and I must say, it was highly effective.
I placed two ads: one targeted parents old enough to have teens, who had kids, and were in a certain income range. The other targeted teens and young adults of driving age. The results were almost instantaneous: I got click-throughs and purchases from a higher percentage of Facebook users than my Google ads did. In fact, I was charged more for the Google Ads impressions where Facebook was all click-throughs.
That being said, the current idea of “advertising” is broken. Advertising as *ads* means rectangular imagery advertising your product. The only enhancement the internet has made to this is allowing clicks. These are almost direct remediations of TV and print ads. The only really effective ads I can think of are pandora ads because they capture the person’s attention in a way they cannot ignore, and actually listen to, whether they like it or not.
Anyway, news.me does seem interesting…
[…] Is there a future where I watch the Super Bowl and not see one car commercial unless I’m shopping for a car, which I discussed last year: http://blog.ninamehta.com/2010/what-if-ads-werent-such-a-bad-thing/ […]