On useful advertising

A friend of mine came back from Cuba and said he had met the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. But that is another story. He also said how refreshing it was not to see a single advert or brand in the time he was there. I have never been there so I don’t know how accurate this is but I find the idea appealing.

In the future people are going to see fewer advertisements. This should be the aim of the advertising industry – fewer ads, more relevant, more welcome. People have an instinctive resistance to advertising built up from years of exposure to incessant, irrelevant ads. Spammers are derided but they work on a similar principle as TV advertisers: get your ad in front of enough people and someone will respond. The only real game changer we have seen is Google who could sell advertisers the attention of the people who were searching on a particular keyword.

Social networks have similar potential to Google as they are, in essence, giant marketing databases. The problem is that none of them have worked out how to use them effectively. The most notable attempt so far, faceook’s Beacon, managed to create a system which for the first time actively irritated users. I’m not sure this is what Zuckerberg had in mind when he said media changes every 100 years but the outcome reminded me of Doc Brown wiring the flux capacitor wrongly and getting a load of rubbish blown in his face (or something). The bottom line is you should not be using your giant marketing database to cause highly targeted annoyance.

People don’t want no advertising. Social networks have the potential to be great discovery engines and deliver ads people actually want to see, but they are currently failing.