Raise Your Hand if You Want More Ads

Nobody?

But come on, they’re “targeted,” “contextual” and “highly relevant.”

You still don’t want more ads?

Oh, wait, I know…how about if we automatically put an ad on your mobile phone, based on wherever you are.  Don’t worry…it’ll be targeted, contextual and highly relevant.  You know, like all the other ads you see on the Web are.

Just imagine…you’ll be walking by a Starbucks when an ad for that Starbucks will appear on your mobile phone.  It’ll be great!

Wait.

That wouldn’t be great.  That would be awful.  Presumably if I’m walking and looking at my phone, I’m doing something on it.  Putting an ad there would be seriously annoying.  But that’s the great glittering dream of many people in the advertising business now, as reflected in this story on Ad Age.  Here’s a key tidbit:

“It’s the ad served while you are reading the news in the morning on an e-reader that knows you’re at home and three blocks from a Starbucks. It’s a loyalty program on your phone that, through a hotel-room sensor, sets the lights and thermostat and turns the TV to CNN when you walk in the door. It’s finding a restaurant in a strange city on a Tuesday night, discovering that a store nearby stocks the TV you’re looking for, or that a certain grocery on the way home has the cut of meat you need.”

I’ve been in the Internet/Web/E-Commerce business for more than a decade now, and people  have been having this particular fantasy the whole time.  And for some reason, the example they give has always been Starbucks.  What’s up with that?

But beyond simply highlighting the lack of original thinking on the part of the people in the advertising business, this way of thinking shows something else:  these guys never think about the history of their industry.  First, someone invents a new way to advertise and if it catches on, money floods into it.  When money floods into it, the number of impressions increases, the consumer finds it annoying and tunes it out.  When that happens, responsiveness drops, and price follows.  Once price follows, quality isn’t far behind because any scumbag advertiser can buy impressions by the metric ton and will.

And folks, that’s the way it goes.  I’ve talked about it before here and here.

But let’s dig a little deeper on this fantasy.  “It’s a loyalty program on your phone that through a hotel-room sensor sets the lights and thermostat and turns the TV to CNN when you walk in the door.”  Wow.  Not helpful, hotel-room sensor.  I may have set a “preference” for CNN at some point, but I may want to watch something different or just cool it for a minute before I flick the TV on.  And I might be warm or cold or who knows?  The idea that this kind of thing would actually be a positive experience for the human being involved is ludicrous, but you know that embedded somewhere in the experience would be an ad:  “This automatic setting of your heater to 71 degrees made possible by Travelocity.”  (Sorry, Travelocity, I’m not picking on you…it’s just the first brand that popped into my mind that was hotel related.)

Or how about “discovering that a store nearby stocks the TV you’re looking for”?  Ugh.  Yep, I pretty much already knew that Best Buy sold the TVs.  I didn’t need a reminder every time I drove by.

But my favorite one is this: “a certain grocery on the way home has the cut of meat you need.”  Oh, man.  What world do these advertising people live in?  I’m supposed to declare the cut of meat I need at this moment so that this would happen?

Wow.

And then forevermore, I’m having “targeted” ads for beef, other meats, and then eventually all foods served to me because I once expressed an ‘affinity’ for tri-tip.

You laugh, but that’s exactly how this stuff evolves.

The problem is this:  there’s a tension between the needs of advertisers (who want to reach potential buyers effectively and cost-efficiently) and the sellers of advertising (who want to make a living selling products they can sell efficiently).  This tension used to resolve itself quite nicely because traditional advertising was reasonably effective.

Today, it mostly is not.

So the answer for sellers of advertising is to create a good context through which the advertiser can really connect with potential customers without overdoing whatever that context is so that it burns itself out.

For example, dedicated emails from high-quality web sites with email lists that they took good care of were once an excellent advertising vehicle.  Today, so many bad email lists exist with so little actual context or buy-in that even the performance of the best of those has declined as a result.

What’s interesting about the fantasy of mobile ads is that this time around, it could actually be done.  This is going to happen in one way or another.  It’ll sound sexy at first as money pours in, but eventually, it will lead to the same results:  more ads you don’t want and don’t respond to, but you might put up with if someone’s willing to give you something you do want for free in exchange for ignoring the ads.

I’d like to think we could do better than that, but this pattern has repeated itself so many times that I’m not optimistic.