Choose Your Own Advertising
from the well,-why-not? dept
While there are still questions concerning just how well most online advertising works, it appears that some new startups are trying to improve online ads in a different way: by asking the people who see them for feedback. Right now, it sounds pretty simplistic, with a simple thumbs up/thumbs down type of rating system that most people will probably ignore. However, it would be interesting to see how people would respond to a system that really did put people in control. If you must have advertising, why not have it be on stuff that you actually want to see? That isn't necessarily stuff that advertisers or publishers infer from you from the demographic info that you fill out, or the nature of what you're surfing -- but what you specifically say you want to see. Say you know that you're in the market for a new car. What if you could let the system know that, and as you do your daily surfing, most of the ads would be for cars or car loans or whatever made the most sense for you. In some ways, it's exactly why search advertising works well. It basically is displaying ads that are much closer to what someone wants -- on their terms. If there were a way to really apply that to content, it could go over much better than today's ads. If done well, believe it or not, that could actually make advertising much more useful. Unfortunately, actually having it done well seems unlikely.
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Sounds familiar
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Interesting... participation?
What I wonder is, how will the advertisers deal with the results of this type of thing? Some advertisers would probably love to see effectiveness numbers concerning their advertising (maybe Amazon.com or MusiciansFriend.com?). Yet, there are probably others who might not want to be rated in any way… particularly those who market through aggravation. Specifically, companies that create annoying banners or annoying pop-up/pop-under/in-page/across-the-page ads…
But then again, one is likely to remember annoying adverts…
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The problem is converting needs into ads
Anyone who advertises on Google knows how radically different the click-through rates and conversions are for search advertising versus contextual ads.
A series of companies like eWanted sprang up in the Web 1.0 era, and many companies still exist to help capture your buying intentions, but those layer additional ads on top. They don't actually reduce the number of ads you see.
This, alas, is a hard problem.
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No Subject Given
End result would be ads that get more relevant as you rate them. This provides the consumer with an incentive to use the rating system, increases relevancy of the ads served and provides the advertiser with useful statistics.
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Hmm...
Just my thoughts,
Synktar
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They tried this already, I helped write this in 20
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