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from the if-they-had-only-listened-before dept.
Marketoonist ran a story about marketers saying, "Oops, our bad."
The Interactive Advertising Bureau issued a remarkable mea culpa last week about the state of online advertising. In response to the rise of ad-blocking software, IAB VP Scott Cunningham said digital advertisers should take responsibility for annoying people and driving them to use ad blockers:
"We messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience....
"We build advertising technology to optimize publishers' yield of marketing budgets that had eroded after the last recession. Looking back now, our scraping of dimes may have cost us dollars in consumer loyalty...
"The consumer is demanding these actions, challenging us to do better, and we must respond."
Nod to pipedot for running this story.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 26 2015, @11:59AM
I worked on Madison Avenue for a good decade. After the Dot-Bomb it was almost the only game in town for tech. It was an interesting experience and gave me a good window into how the highest echelons of business really work.
Advertising exists because business people don't know how to sell their products. Once in a blue moon you get a client who's an entrepreneur and has figured out how to sell a good or service. Everyone else has inherited an established business. They know people do buy their products/services, they know how many, they know how much they pay, and they know how much it cost to bring it to them. But they don't know why. They don't know how to make people want to give them money. Enter Creative Directors and the Mad Ave brain trust.
Creative Directors figure how to manufacture demand. If you've ever watched the show Mad Men you'll have a stylised, dramatized view of how it works, but one that is essentially correct. Advertising has been that way for decades.
Now that sort of thing is passing away. Google is responsible. They've shifted the game from demand creation to instant fulfillment of pre-existing demand. That's what search-based advertising is all about. There's also a secondary effect now with PR-based marketing. Those are the armies of shills and fake reviewers you see out there to influence purchasing decisions from people who have pre-existing demand.
This current kerfuffle with Ad Blockers is the old-style advertisers waking up to the reality that the rest of the world does not want their old, interruptive form of advertising re-created online. Practices and norms on the Internet have already been deeply established: if you interrupt or stymie, users will route around you.
Washington DC delenda est.