Technology: Why Advertising Sucks

In an online group discussion, Chris Ovenden brought up the mess of advertising we're all immersed in right now:

I have been wondering recently what the world would be like if it were illegal to advertise to people who don't want to be advertised at. (So if they google "fizzy drink" it's okay to send them to pepsi.com; billboards would be out.) But things are going in the opposite direction: ad-supported is about the only financial model anybody seems to be able to come up with.

So what do people think? Is it time to legislate to stop this madness?

My thoughts:

There's no way "ad supported" can pay for as many things as it's supposed to pay for, going forward from here.

People make the same amount of money as always. In the US at least, they're now spending more of it for gasoline and other essentials. They're probably buying about the same amount of crap as always.

There are so many ads because:
- ads are more inefficient today than ever before
- advertisers need people to upend their budgets to buy into new categories of formerly-unknown stuff

Inefficient mechanisms aren't valuable. They have to be operated over and over again to have any influence at all. When the mechanism is advertising, the resulting spray of ads creates more distraction and more competition for attention, which in turn demands more advertising to overcome the ambient noise.

Ads aren't just competing against same-category products (Ford vs Chevy) any more, but against all the other ads for your attention.

Clutter begets clutter in a death spiral. Everyone loses.

The asymmetry that's making things extra messy right now is that online ads are horribly inefficient and cheap, while traditional ads still cost a fortune to book, stage and execute. So by scratching just a couple of minutes of national TV or radio broadcast spots, an advertiser can shake loose enough cash to gum up millions of web page views, wasting zillions of user-hours.

Online I use Firefox + Adblock to make the ads go away. I would be happy to instead pay the site the $0.001 that it might receive for my "viewing", in exchange for a better design whose integrity isn't wrecked by all that useless advertising.

I don't think in the US or elsewhere there'd be any legal way to legislate against ads... everyday free speech is sure becoming a problem, but commercial free speech seems to be pretty well protected :-). And as practical matter, how would ya? I do favor real-world community standards for physical signage, billboards, and so on, but these are at least clearly delineated - physical signs live inside the legal boundaries of a place and can be measured, licensed, and so on.

Ads often destroy the coherence of online properties.. aren't efficient... are intrusive. If an entertainment provider is no longer entertaining, or an information providers is more about ads than information, people will eventually wander away. I might be more of an early adopter/rejecter than then general population, but all come around to these conclusions eventually.

The real problem is that the packaged-entertainment-products industries have been horribly wrong at interpreting and responding to the rejection of inferior goods and/or inferior experiences by consumers. By contrast, nobody's said the Oldsmobile brand folded because customers "failed" to buy ugly, badly-built cars.

I liked Santosh Dawara's example[1] of a moviehouse that's going after profit by maxing out the daily screenings, trying to pull in every available rupee. This is the same as not leaving factory machinery idle when it could be making stuff. It's also a market differentiator. When faced with more-or-less identical competition, a successful strategy is to offer new reasons to choose you over someone else. If everyone else is showing ads, show movies instead. And the movies themselves seem to have have crowded out advertising in this venue, which is a great triumph for movies, if it works.

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[1] Santosh Dawara wrote:

I am currently working with the number 1 Multiplex in India (in terms of avg. annual occupancy). They have decided to take a unique approach - they don't show ads. Instead, they focus on packing in as many Shows per screen per day. This approach maximizes their profit making ability on the weekends. They show an average *6* shows per screen per day. This is probably a national record. Note, these are Hindi movies with 3 hour durations. Another downside is that the intervals are as short as 5 mins. Never enough time to go grab popcorn.