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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
Now where have I heard this ratings idea before... Oh yeah, TiVo.
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Interesting... participation?
This is an interesting thing (sorry, I’m not using tivo at the moment).
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
Just receiving ads that fit your needs isn't enough. The reason search advertising is so effective is because it puts the message in front of the prospect at the right time: When she is looking.
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
A simple, easy to use rating system (think google groups "Rate this post"), combined with collaborative filtering could work nicely.
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...
Excellent idea, but would someone really take the time to fill out what they want to see in the ads in the first place? Are people to attached to ad blockers by now? Wouldn't someone have to fill out what they want in the ad for each different website, or would that information be stored in a) a database somewhere or b) with a cookie. If it is stored with a database, how is the user identified? Wouldn't this allow more tracking of what the user looks and and doesn't look at, thus possibly causing more privacy issues (if they use the database method and require people to sign up and login to view choosen-content ads)?
Just my thoughts,
Synktar
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They tried this already, I helped write this in 20
Sigh, gives me old bubble (will it be retromarketed as Web 1.0 like Sun made SunOS 4.x into Solaris 1.0?) memories. It didn't work for us because we didn't get it out before the bubble burst. Never got the cash infusion to make it grow. Just withered until the company (after i left) was bought by DoubleCLick. We had UI issues (this was IE/NS4.0 days, not very good CSS or DHTML) . I wrote the original UI in javascript, and also wrote the Apache module to serve the ads. was fun, but glad i left when i did. We had a patent, so will be interesting if DoubleCLick will sue. The patent really didn't cover our exact system, it covered the idea, and we never made an "As-built" patent, so not sure how it would hold up in court.
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