I grew up in an age where some of the most creative and brilliant people in the world went into advertising. It was evidence in the memorable excellence in ads that came out in the 50s. Ad agencies also started using psychologists and assorted behavioral experts to understand what will motivate us to buy things.
In an earlier era David Sarnoff pioneered NBC TV with a vision of bringing opera and classical music to the masses. He hired one of the most prominent symphony orchestra conductors to lead the NBC orchestra. But around the corner, the guys at CBS went to a more banal level. They tried to make people laugh and in between chuckles they crammed more and more ads.
The ads got more frequent and less creative. As people started to turn away from them, the ads grew more persistent and louder and more intrusive. The value proposition of the ad industry moved away from being charming and clever to just cramming the message into people’s foreheads.
Before he abandoned his dream, Sarnoff saw NBC actual present opera. But the masses didn’t watch. They were over on CBS watching Jack Benny joke about being cheap while selling Phillip Morris cigarettes.
There are those who accuse me of being anti-advertising. They say that if a company provides “free” content on the web as other companies provided it on TV in earlier times, then people like me should sit down and shut up and let the sites like Facebook do whatever they need to do to be compensated for the service they provide.
Well, unlike TV, on Facebook, people provide the content. So I tend to think that people should therefore either share in the compensation generated by ads that surround the content or AT LEAST give people some say in how that advertising is presented.
Two online companies I know are taking highly intelligent approaches to advertising and user information: Google, which has proven that you can be wildly successful with understated contextual advertising and Twitter, which is showing some commendable sensitivity as it injects advertising into its traditional ad-free neighborhoods.
It seems to me that there are many ways to use my data that would get me to welcome advertising. For example, when I travel, I would love to get offers on places to stay or dine. When I need a new washer-dryer, I’m eager to get ads on great deals from retailers near me. If I’m looking for a used car, I’d love to have people & dealers make offers to me.
There are two essential components to these ads:
(1)I generate my own data. When I want advertisers to know about me, I want to decide what they get told. Any third-party vendor will be motivated by criteria that goes beyond my personal need. Only I have my best interests at heart in such a situation.
(2) I can stop them whenever I want. Once I buy a washing machine, I do not wish to have appliance vendors offering me refrigerators and room air conditioners for the rest of my natural life.
These thoughts are not entirely my own. Doc Searls, a former ad exec, turned social media guru is probably the driving thinker in this area. Rick Segal with whom I traveled extensively a few years back has also shaped my thinking.
I seems these thought trains are clue-filled. They are realistic and technologically not difficult. I think there are tons of dollars to be made. Social media exploded in recent times because people wanted to have a say. A blog comment was preferable to shouting at your TV set.
Now it’s time for people to have a say in ads that are put in front of them and they should have a say when those ads stop, or so it seems to me.
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