Ed Cone helpfully points me to this erstwhile report on the state of American journalism, and me — I point and laugh. Where do these people come from — and how do so many fit under one rock?
This long-winded rundown on “the future of advertising” utterly fails to capture the fact that power has irrevocably shifted to the consumer in the digital age. Yes, ad companies can try to target and measure and metric who sees what ad, but consumers can pro-actively blunt those attempts, rendering the penetration data meaningless.
Advertisers confuse an audience with a captive audience. Just because I visit a Web site does not mean I will see a single ad on it. I control the javascripts, not the advertisers. Example, ESPN.com is usable again as I have installed my own script to turn off the junk — and thousands of others have done the same. I just want the content, not the pop-ups, the loud audio, the blinking flashing, bandwidth-sapping ads.
This should sound familiar.
The record industry decided that it had a captive audience for hit singles and tried to force 10 other songs and $18 price-point on the music audience. How’d that work out? People used technology to route around that business model and end up with a distribution model that they wanted. Digital advertising is nothing more than a form of digital rights management, and advertisers and content owners are once again pricing themselves out of the market.
No specific content — or very, very little of it — is worth sitting through an endless parade of ads for utterly random products. But I do value the total universe of content a great deal. The solution for me, and an increasing number of digital media consumers, is to invest a little bit of time up-front to devise an ad-less Web experience that provides 95 percent of the content without 100 percent of the ads. That anyone can write over 10,000 words on the future of advertising and not mention this trend proves just how hopelessly confused the mainstream has become.
And Web ads are not the only thing consumers reject. The tightly closed “affinity” marketing schemes — forget it. It is impossible to keep a secret on the Net. Like the celluar provider who was offering free “premium” sports coverage content to members of its network — only. Except you could sign up for a free trial business account and stream all you wanted.
Or how about all the praise for modern digital CATV to be able to tell if I switch away from a commercial. OK, tell me how you are going to measure (and charge for) ad time when I kill the broadcast audio for the duration of the spot and listen to iTunes instead, all with the flick of one switch? (Came in very handy during the ACC Tourney.)
We will move to ever-more opt-in type advertising — where I specifically agree to view a set of ads tightly targeted to my particularly area of interest(s) based on info I have volunteered. Helpful, informative vendor Web sites will also become an ever-more important part of marketing and selling a product.
Update: Former N&O reporter Chris O’Brien finds similar fault with the ad-centric model for journalism. Shhh, he’s a dookie. Ix-nay on the oop-lay.
