One thing that needs to change in 2010 – advertising models

Ad blindness.

It is an affliction that affects anyone who has been on the web for any length of time. In some cases it is bragged about as some kind of honor. In other cases people won’t change browsers until there is some sort of effective ad blocker available for it.

Kevin Kelleher talks about this in his To-Do List for Google post at GigaOM and how at the same time display ad revenues have been dropping in general they have been on the rise on mobile devices. While I agree with Kevin when he says it is about getting online shoppers noticing display ads again I think it is going to be a much bigger up hill climb that he, or others think.

Advertisers

On the side of the advertisers I believe that there is a whole bunch being done wrong. Of those various things the biggest has to be attitude.

It strikes me that advertisers are making a classic error in assuming that everything they have been doing for years in the print and visual mediums can just be copied over to the online world.

It can’t.

The old way was equivalent to putting together a great big heaping plate of spaghetti and then throwing it against the biggest wall you could find. The hope being that one out of every hundred, every thousand, or every ten thousand would stop in utter amazement and say that they just had to have that spaghetti.

This was easy to do when you were dealing with what amounted to captive audiences. That is why advertisers loved television. Sure the print and radio medium were useful but they didn’t produce the same number of captives for the same length of time.

However even the success of that kind of advertising was about to reach its end as things like TiVo and ‘watch-on-demand’ gained steam; but still the numbers were on the side of the advertisers.

Then along comes the Internet. Not the 1.0 version but rather the pain in the ass 2.0 version because all of a sudden demographics got smaller and more niche oriented. Gone were the ten’s of thousands just waiting for the next plate of spaghetti to be thrown. Now advertisers had people talking back or gawd forbid ignoring them totally.

Still, advertisers tried to use their old methods of mass ad bombing across all the top sites. After all that is where all the people were right? It didn’t matter if the ads had nothing to do with why the people were visiting those sites just as long as they were seeing those ads.

Except they weren’t.

Now regardless to what all the freetards might think the Web as we know it, all those free apps that we like to use and all those free games we like to play all cost money. It all costs money somewhere down the road. There is really no such thing as free – everything has an associated prices somewhere along the way and for better or worse those bills, those paychecks, those inflated valuation all get paid through advertising.

Advertisers at some point have to admit in 2010 that everything they have based their eyeball acquisition on doesn’t work the same on the web. They need to realize that people are no longer eyeballs staring at spaghetti on the wall anymore. They need to realize that those eyeballs are all finding places that they want to be and with the turning of the tables the advertisers are going to have to go where those eyeballs are and in such a way that people are treated like people – not a commodity looking to buy spaghetti.

People

If there is one thing that the Web has done for people it is that it has made them feel empowered when it comes to dealing with advertisers. No longer is it a case of suffering through twenty minutes of ads for every hour show we watch. Now it is a case of either blocking them out with a browser add-on or literally becoming blind to them.

We can brag to our friends about how we never see ads as we share the coolest link to some new free service or program or game. We laugh at news companies that talk about having to retreat behind paywalls while we surf through Google News or some other new aggregator of what is hot and interesting.

We feast on the goodness of the Web without having to pay anymore than the cost of access from our broadband providers.

Well just as the advertisers need to change their attitudes and practices on the web so do we. Free is nice but behind that free someone has a family to feed, a company has to earn a profit so they can make more cool stuff. This means some sort of method needs to be found so that those things can be met and we can keep on getting all that cool free stuff.

It means that we as consumers need to understand that this is a two way street as well. We can’t just keep taking and not giving something back in return and in this case the fairest return is to stop blocking those ads and stop being so blind.

It’s a two way street

Advertisers desperately need to rethink their models. They need to realize that niches can be the new marketplace. They need to find their voice instead of throwing spaghetti. They need to be able to listen to our voices – large, medium and small.

On the flip side we need to realize that even something with a free sticker on it has a price somewhere, somehow. We need to stop being so self-righteous about how money is made by those whose sites we visit and read on a daily basis.

Advertisers need to change. We need to change.