Advertising, throughout its history, has relied on the art of getting in the way. An ad is that irritating thing that tries to flash across your field of view while you try to get on with what is important to you. In order to catch its prey, the ad has to be unavoidable. It has to be a hurdle that stands between the consumer and the content that they actually want to consume: be it a TV show, a YouTube video or a billboard on a highway. You don’t ‘consume’ a highway, but you know what I mean. A highway gets you where you’re trying to go: advertising doesn’t.
Only a small handful of advertising campaigns are memorable, enjoyable and contribute to media or popular culture. The rest are just part of the messy background-noise of capitalism, a jungle of promises that we are trained to distrust at an early age. Just remember that every time we see an ad and think, “there is no chance that I would buy that” someone has wasted money. Someone has paid to reach out to you, but in the end they were just fumbling around in the dark. Most advertising today, even with the targeted advertising that internet data and cookies can provide, still acts like a sprinkler system, watering a large patch of land with the hope that at least one flower will grow. This system is very wasteful and expensive for the advertiser and very irritating to those who have been sprinkled involuntarily.
People need to be incentivised to watch ads. Usually, this happens by withholding content. This means that most of the time, a viewer is negatively disposed to an advert: it’s a nuisance, an obstacle. But what if there was a system where the advertisement is the content, and people watch it voluntarily. In this system, the ad is not a hurdle but rather a finish line. The viewer is thus more positively disposed to the ad, and therefore more likely to buy the product.
Better for the customer
Imagine gaining a portion of true value every time you view an ad. No, this isn’t the dystopian ‘Ad Buddy’ from Netflix’s ‘Maniac’, this is one of the features of the Nimses app. A user on the Nimses Social Media platform gets rewarded for fully engaging with advertising content. The advertiser provides nims, the digital unit of value corresponding to one lived minute of human life. The time they spend watching the ad is reimbursed to them. This is just one way of earning nims. Nimses incentivises engaging with legitimate and appealing advertising content. If you don’t want to watch the ad, you simply don’t.
Better for the advertiser
On Nimses, a person can be geographically targeted and the advertising they are exposed to will be curated, not just with their preferences in mind but also with their current GPS location. Targeting by IP address is highly inaccurate: we don’t always stay where our device is registered. Nimses is a location-centric app, therefore it requires Users to give access to their current area although exact, pin-point location is never shared.
Not only is this system accurate but the advertiser only pays when the ad has been viewed in full. No more wasting money trying to reach people who would never be interested in the first place, or on impressions that never caught the viewer’s eye.
This is just the beginning
This is just one of many ways in which the new Nimses anthroposphere is revolutionizing our approach to basic aspects of the online and offline economy. Nimses aims to be an egalitarian new reality governed by the only unit with intrinsic value: the minutes of a human life.
