How would it look like if advertising was reinvented today?
Advertising has been around for centuries, and it has came a long long way. I want to look back at the changes that have been made throughout the years in digital advertising. Let’s go back to the start of digital advertising in television. Television advertising was good but not great due to the lack of audience in certain cases. The reason for that is because advertisements can easily be turned off by changing the channel or turning off the television. Most people only have 1–2 TV’s in their house, so these advertisements are not following you when you are in a different spot around the house. It’s ultimately the viewers choice whether or not they wanted to watch the ad and whether they liked or disliked the ad. If an ad did not appeal to a viewers, they could easily not pay attention and let the ad play but not listen; however, if they were interested they could watch, retain the information, and make a purchasing decision based on the ad. An ideal ad for a company is one that people retain and listen to to make a decision based on that information. So if someone is actually looking for a new truck, they are more likely to pay attention to a truck advertisement, do some research on the brand, and possibly make a purchase decision based on that. An ideal world in television advertising is if you had the power to ONLY see advertisements from truck companies that you want to see in order to make a decision on that. Then, once you’ve made your decision on a truck and made that purchase, you look for different ads.
That leads us to the next phase of advertising: digital advertising on the internet. Internet advertising solved the problem of seeing advertisements of things that you are interested in. So in this case, you could be searching for a truck on the internet to purchase in 2016, then continuously see truck advertisements after you purchase the truck all the way through 2018. The problem with this is, your search history carries with you for life. The issues with internet advertising is they feel intrusive and stick to you for a very long time. They also could be intrusive in a way where they are looking at your data and sell this information to a data broker to try and get the best advertisement pushed towards you. Which to most people is something that is of annoyance and ethically unjust. That is why so many people have gone through the process of downloading the ad-block plus.
However, have you ever gotten a pop up like this when surfing the internet with ad-blocker on? It’s not encouraging when you can’t even browse the web sometimes because you are not supporting a publishers website. It’s offensive to users that they cannot browse the web the way that they choose because a website is taking a blow in monetization money. See, websites rely on advertisement clicks to make their money, and when you see a pop-up like this, you immediately get turned off and don’t want to pay the price — even if it is only 99 cents.
The solution would be offering content without cluttering it with ads and distracting the user from the content, this would enable “binge watching” phenomenon and getting pennies that was being generated from ads directly from the end user. People are willing to pay for Netflix because they have freedom to binge watch content that they like without any interruptions of advertisements. This is the same analogy on the internet today but most of the time people are not looking to pay on the internet. However, when there are no ads, people will binge content that they enjoy without feeling interrupted or intruded. For publisher’s it is not smart to not allow people to use the site simply because they have an ad blocker enabled on the website.
Ads are still good and provide value, but digital advertising in it’s todays form is too intrusive and wasteful. Letting users choose when they are willing to get ads and where, would ultimately solve end user frustration. Letting users choose what kind of ads he/she wants and matchmaking based on his/her personal data without that data leaving user control would solve accuracy and fraud issues. Similar to the analogy about turning the TV on and off, you can choose which ads you want and which ads you want to filter out. This way the users are happy and the publishers will be happy too. However, as long as ad-blockers are a thing, the publishers will not be happy with monetization.
