Advertising - Horrible or Interesting?

I recently came accross a great quote from the internet pioneer Dave Winer regarding advertising. Interesting. People's attitude to advertising can be funny. Many (most?) simply don't care. Some love (certain kinds of) advertising. And some are very vocal opponents of advertising and want to 'protect' as much of the world from advertising as is possible - including the virtual world. For them any kind of advertising is 'evil'.

My own attitude is somewhat mixed. I have no TV anymore, for example. The reason for this decision was (mostly) that advertising made most of the programming unbearable to me. I finally gave up when - sometime in the late 90s - a movie was interrupted by advertising 6 times with two of the interruptions happening in the first 30 minutes! That was annoying. On the other hand I am a user of many 'free' (ad supported!) services on the web. Most of them use adsense-type contextual advertising and - lo and behold - I regularly click on some of the ads.

Whats the difference? Two big differences exist, actually:

1. Acceptable advertising does not keep me from doing what I want to do (getting into the flow with a good movie for example)
2. Acceptable advertising strifes to be relevant (and succeeds in at least some cases)

Dave Winer phrased it like this:

Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information.

Couldn't have said it better. (But I am afraid, some people will still don't like it, because it's 'commercial'. Can't help these guys .)

Disclaimer: The Otherland Group is currently maintaining one of the larger professional ad networks in Second Life. My opinions might be biased ...

Technorati Tags: advertising, marketing, performance marketing

Comments

[Christian Scholz]

About that quote: If it's totally targeted towards me and I really get the stuff I am just right now wishing for it's still advertisment ;-)

It's especially not objective information as there might be x products solving my problem out there but only one might be displayed because the producer pays the most.

When I think further about this I think it's even quite scary to directly get your buy impulse triggered by targeted advertisement.

(I also never click on ads anyway and I also think the ad based model is somewhat the problem we face right now for a couple of reasons. One is that ad supported websites tend to be more closed as they want to keep eyeballs on their ads).

[Markus Breuer (Pham Neutra)]

Christian, advertising has a lot of aspects. One of them - nearly forgotten these days - is, to inform potential customers about products available on the market. No, this is not meant in an ironic way. This is how advertising started, actually. ;) (I don't deny that advertising by definition will always try to influence your attitude and behavior, too. But that's what everyone does, with whom you argue. And a salesman, who does not want to influence you, to buy his product - instead the competition's product - is not a very good salesman ...)

To do this 'objectively' (whatever that may mean in a competitive market; I guess, what you are meaning is more or less 'fair and balanced') would mean to present probably dozens or maybe even hundreds of product descriptions side by side. I am not sure if this would really be a service to the consumer. But this might be personal preference, as I am no one who does a lot of 'research' when buying stuff. I hate doing this. When someone offers me this stuff in a moment where I need/want it, I consider this a great service and not scary at all. :) Yes, I even click on ads.

Actually, while I despise many forms of advertising used these days, I am not sure how our economy would function without any advertising. Advertising is one of the mechanisms by which producers compete. I know a lot of idealists - often with an engineering background - who think that companies should compete exclusively by "just trying to make a 'better product'". I don't think that this will work very well, though, as it can take a long, long time for the 'better product' to succeed in the market place. Maybe the producer of this product is bankrupt by then ... Advertising can speed up the this adoption process significantly. The already dominant companies can try to counteract this with their advertising, of course - thats the nature of competition. But others have written about that much better and much more elaborate texts. In the end it is a matter of belief, though. But still, I don't know any modern economy which works without some kind of advertising.

No everyone might agree with me here, but, IMHO, the #1 fuel for the Web 2.0 has been advertising, too. The gigantic cost for supporting the huge server farms and high bandwidth connections has to be covered by someone. The companies setting up these systems are not altruistically motivated. Just check it out: aside from a very few projects, most of the well established web 2.0 platforms are funded by advertising dollar - or become part of larger companies, soon, where the losses of these 'free' services are covered by the profits made with other - ad-supported - projects by the same company.

Yes, the Wikipedia is an exception. I don't know many others, though. :)