Introducing social ads

In search of a cleaner greener online world Three weeks ago, I was moderating a session at the Digital Hollywood Building Blocks conference in San Jose. I took the time to check out the exhibitors and I attended few sessions. From a consumer's viewpoint, my assessment was that the online advertising industry seems to look good from far, but far from good. On one hand, a lot of progress is being made with new platforms, new types of advertising networks, new metrics, new measuring tools, new standards, etc. On the other hand, the industry remains highly wasteful with an extremely low ROI from ads. It also seems to be stuck to its old and ugly habit of assaulting and interrupting consumers with unwanted ads. Marketers, advertisers, advertising agencies, advertising networks, and publishers all seems to be catering to each other at the expense of the most important constituent - the consumer. How so, should you ask? Well, despite the encouraging migration from the offline world to the online world, and aside some of few exceptions, generally speaking advertising continues to be interruptive, boring, repetitive, irrelevant, and thus extremely annoying. From that perspective, the conference was disappointing. I was hoping to encounter vendors and hear panelists talk about permission marketing advanced by Seth Godin few years ago. I was also hoping to discover tools, methods, processes, and standards which will encourage consumers to engage with a brand bypulling consumers under their terms with their permission rather than pushing and shoving ads through their throats at the most undesirable moment. One of the sessions was about hypertargeting. Wait a minute! HYPERTARGETING??!!! To start with, the term "targeting" is offensive, and by the way, I've never agreed to be targeted let alone be hypertargetted. For your information advertisers, I am not a TARGET. This is not a war nor a hunt. I've got news for you: I don't want to be targeted - neither contextually nor behaviorally. Get off my back!!! As a consumer, what I want is to be able to consummate content without being interrupted. It is my prerogative, and only mine, to decide if, when, and how I might look at your ads on occasions. You need my permission to discover my interest, to follow me where I go, and to record my surfing habits. If you abuse my trust, or if you breach my privacy, or if you compromise my security, or if you simply annoy me, I'll take this privilege away from you at any time without notice and I will black list you. Of course, I'll make sure that all my friends know about you too. That's what the social web has promised - empowering consumers - and we are still waiting for the delivery of that wonderful promise. Permission supersedes relevancy or targeting. The fact that I have the right profile, or visited the right web pages, or took certain actions, does not necessarily make me a good prospect and does not give you the right to target me by interrupting me under the pretext that I might be a good prospect. How is that different from spamming?!!! Maybe I simply stumbled on your ad. Maybe I am a competitor spying on you. Maybe I was interest but not anymore. Maybe I am still interested but not now. Maybe I am interested but can't afford it. Maybe I already bought your product or a competing one. You can target, analyze, and measure all you want, but you can never discover my real intention until you ask me with my permission. I, and only I, decide whether I am a good prospect to anybody. In a lot of ways, advertising is like torture - almost all experts agree that information obtained through torture is unreliable. Similarly, information obtained through current advertising systems is misleading resulting into ridiculously low ROI. Yet, almost all players in that conference seem to be ecstatic about their new offerings. Like religion, advertising sells hope, a lot of hope. Advertisers throw an insane amount of money in the hope that they will get buyers or in the hope that they will earn a certain mind share or awareness. Their prayer is worth no more than 1% to 5%. That means that 95% to 99% of their money is wasted. It's one thing if marketers want to throw their money away, but it's another if they do it at consumers' expense by polluting theirworld with unwanted ads. While I do recognize and applaud the advancements and the innovations that are occurring in the online advertising industry, I can't help but to notice how out of touch the players are. They are focusing on themselves by offering more analytics, more metrics, more standards, and more networks, while ignoring consumers' needs. They are analyzing and measuring the wrong things to serve each other. The single most important constituent in this ecosystem is not the publisher, or the marketer, or the advertiser, or the advertising agency, or the advertising network, but the consumer. Read this article on Vator.tv

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Vator TV | August 31, 2008

Tags:. .advertisers. .social. .hollywood. .ago. .agencies