Our relationship with advertising
In this blog I will explore the fractious relationship we have we advertising and what the future might hold for it.
For me personally, my biggest issue with advertising is how interruptive it is. Â In most cases it stops me doing what I wanted to do. Even if its just for a few seconds I make a concious note that that company choose to interrupt what I was trying to do because they feel what they are saying is more important.
I know they are not actually saying that but that is how it feels. There has quite a few examples this year where I am reading a tragic story in the news and then a really poor choice of advert overlays my screen to interrupt me. Now I realise that they company behind the advert probably had no idea what they were interrupting, but I am sure if they realised the context they would have cringed.
So the challenge? Publishers want and need revenue. Consumers in the main don't want adverts. Is that true? From my experience that is the case. Are there people that want adverts? We will explore that in a bit. If we want our content for free we have to expect some form of payment or trade off. Now I do understand this and in fact its not advertising in general I have an issue with just the type that holds you up or stops you half way.
YouTube and their pre roll adverts is a good example. There must be some people somewhere who don't press skip now or how would they ever make any money? It must be by mistake. There is only two adverts I have not skipped.
One was a Google Chrome advert and the song in the video was one of my favourites from my teenage years, and the other was actually promoting a relevant piece of content that I was in fact interested in.
This 2nd one is the way forward I believe. They were promoting free content that I was 100% interested in. It was completely contextual and relevant. 99% of other adverts are not.
There is still a problem with the targeting technology. If my son uses my laptop to search and consume content my cookies now tell the advertising world that I am interested in that stuff. Or if I purchase a gift for my nan it now thinks I like that kind of stuff and keeps serving me ads for months on end.
But without ads how would many publishers survive? Would you pay a subscription for access to content? Most would not, we expect it to be free.
I think advertising has its place when its intelligent, like they say its not advertising that's bad, its bad advertising!
Anything that sits subtly on the side of webpages or in the header or footer I can handle. I may not click on them or even take any notice but they do not alter my experience in consuming the content. Â Anything that stops me doing that just annoys me.
It is a fine line. I would love to see technology get smarter and start serving up better ads without disrupting that are relevant and contextual. Until then, Skip.
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Author- Speaker - Consultant. Passionate about all things digital.