Archive for April, 2007

Kurt Vonnegut is gone. Anyone who enjoys a good story–or an honest examination of what it means to be human–will miss him a great deal. I know I will.

At a conference yesterday, during a discussion of some future projects being planned by my company, we were presented with some MS Word wireframes for a new search product. These wireframes had been created by a rather highly placed product developer–essentially a psuedo-engineer–and yet they contained graphical representations of theoretical ad units within the page diagrams. This got me thinking.

Initially I began to worry about the integrity of an engineer–any engineer–who would willingly deface his work with marketing apparatus. I then began to postulate on the worth and value of ad units in the big picture of for-profit internet ventures. Lying awake that night I began to trace the history of advertising as it pertained to me, and my earliest exposures to various forms of marketing. It led me to openly question the need for advertising anywhere within the confines of an index page.

Let me explain.

I work for a “media” company, which is a fancy way of saying I work for a slowly dying newspaper desperately attempting to diversify itself out of irrelevance. This is, by definition, not a dot com or a “web 2.0″ outfit. We are solidly rooted in the business of replacing the craigslistified revenue stream of classified advertising with something else, to varying degrees of success. One thing we’ve trained ourselves to believe, some of us anyway, is that banner advertising works; and by works I mean clients buy ads, we post them, people click on them and make purchases based on their existence. Rinse and repeat.

In this model two actual transactions take place, one which results in profit for the advertiser and one for the publication on which the ad appears, respectively. This agreed definition is what drives internet advertising sales within media companies. The notion that visibility counts for something is very powerful to companies like newspapers who have for a hundred years relied on little more than reputation to sell ink. The problem is, after ten years of using and developing the web, I’ve observed the process to be broken.

Advertisers and media companies go back and forth about whether web advertising works, inventing new ad positions and platforms every 14 months or so as needed to prop up flagging response, while users struggle along just trying to avoid all this background noise. When I explain this people usually accuse me of being an overly sensitive designer, unwilling to have his precious design destroyed by some blinking travesty of a Flash ad. While this may be true, I ask you to explain to me why there are no banner ads on television? Why are there no interstitial ads as I surf from channel to channel? If I open an issue of Time magazine and begin to read an article about male impotence, why is there no Viagra ad underneath the second paragraph?

Furthermore, if it works so well, why do we all hide it in a giant bar along the right or left hand sides of our page layouts, removed from the flow in an obvious attempt to reduce the visual clutter? We’ve managed to build our sales competency to levels that would make Willy Loman quake in his Thom McCans, but we can’t figure out any more sophisticated ways of doing ads than to chuck some blinking shit into a square? Dude.

But we have to make money, I hear you say. Of course you do.

Head over to youtube.com. Go ahead, I’ll wait. What’s that on the right hand side of the screen? It’s a sophisticated cross branded ad for the UFC on Spike TV, in my case. Not a banner. Not a dancing bear with crosshairs. A piece of content made to look exactly like all the other content on youtube–a video, with player controls and ratings. Brilliant. I bet Spike TV spent a chunk of change they normally reserve only for national airtime on a spot like that. I bet it works like hell, too. Or what about Daring Fireball? John Gruber is a full time blogger monetizing his site through The Deck, a targeted advertising network. It vets all its advertisers before letting them join–it even invites some of them, imagine that–and makes sure that the advertisers message will match the spot in which it will appear. Talk about targeted.

And there’s Text Link Ads, and Google AdWords, both products that maintain the visual flow and scannability of a text heavy page–or get out of the way of complex web apps with lots of granular steps–while still providing solutions for monetization.

In my experience the internet is really quite simple; it’s a users medium, slanted hopelessly against media companies and “old media” outlets looking to make a quick buck. It resists attempts to be balkanized, because that’s what the military–and Sir Berners-Lee–designed it to do. We talk so much about building trust, building the brand, being friends with our users–and then we build peel over ads. We use ad positions with sound and no readily available mute button. Then we build in a mute button and count everyone who uses it in our clickthru numbers, and pass that shit on to advertisers. If the internet is the Wild West we are a bunch of crooked sheriffs, telling the townsfolk we’ll protect them with our content, then taking a bribe from Billy The Kid with our ad units.

We have to let go. To get out of the way. We must honor the user. We cannot make a business model out of insinuating ourselves into processes where we don’t belong. Satellite radio, the Tivo and scissors all exist to remove advertising from the experience. I want the internet to be the first medium that says, “We hear you, yes begging for money is irritating and necessary, and we have some solutions to make us all happy.” So far, for old media in search of new money, all we’re saying is “pardon the interruption”–and by “pardon” we mean “screw you” and by “the interruption” we mean “click here, sucker.”

So, I’m in the bathroom this afternoon and I hear someone come in and step up to do his business.

He’s talking on the phone.

While that alone would be pretty deplorable–having a conversation on the phone while using the freakin’ toilet–the content of his conversation proved to be much worse. This past weekend two teenage girls were killed by a drunk driver. They were good students wearing their seatbelts, with families and hobbies. A candlelight vigil is being held in their honor at a local landmark tonight.

The pee phone guy is a content producer here. He was advising a camera crew about going out to get footage.

“Yeah,” he said. “The best friend’ll be there, the family. It’s one-stop shopping for misery.”