Advertising: the end is nigh
As we approach the end of 2014, the best way to describe the state of advertising would be terminal: out-of-date methods that the vast majority of us simply reject, aided and abetted by companies unable to change their approach to getting their clients’ messages over, and that at best leave us cold or that at worst generate outright hostility, not to mention metrics designed to keep company executives happy but that make no sense in the real world… and all based on the mistaken belief that saturating us with publicity somehow creates brand awareness.
Two recent moves illustrate just how nigh the end of advertising is: Dish Network is a US-based satellite television provider that developed AutoHop, which allows viewers to skip advertising breaks when recording programs and that had won every court case TV companies had brought. But it has now been forced to lift AutoHop except on programs that are more than a week old due to pressure from commercial stations, which had threatened not only to continue pursuing the matter through the courts, but also to prevent the use of its content on Dish’s online channel.
The TV stations’ hoary argument is that eliminating advertising infringes their copyright; in other words, what they broadcast, including advertising, is covered by intellectual copyright, a line of reasoning that has seen them lose one court case after another. The reality is that the same viewers who change channel during advertising breaks, or make a cup of tea or go to the bathroom, skip advertising when they record programs, effectively meaning that advertisers are not getting their message over. From a viewer’s perspective, eliminating advertising from programs makes a great deal of sense.
Meanwhile, it looks like the French publishing industry is preparing a lawsuit against AdBlock Plus, one of the most popular services for filtering advertising on websites, and also the most business-friendly, allowing advertisers through that accepted its Acceptable Ads Manifesto. What has happened is that as growing numbers of people are turning to services to isolate themselves from advertising (up to 30 percent, and up to 40 percent in the case of adolescents), the industry is hitting back by killing the messenger.
The publishing industry is once again dispalying willful ignorance by failing to understand that taking companies that provide advertising blocking services to court will only make matters worse, making more people aware that it is possible to filter out advertising, increasing the speed with which we adopt applications that, lest we forget, are open sourced, and therefore literally unstoppable. Whatever the courts decide, if you or I want to block advertising from our smartphones and computers, we will find a way to do so. Turning this into a legal problem is simply repeating what happened when the entertainment industries tried to close down P2P sites, and which, a decade on, are as popular as ever, except in those countries where they have come up with ways to facilitate access to content at reasonable prices.
Killing the messenger is obviously not the best way to solve the problems afflicting the advertising industry; learning to adapt to new mediums is. And that means using formats that do not generate hostility, and above all, to respect users. That, sadly, is something the advertising industry still seems a long way from doing.
(En español, aquí)
