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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: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday October 26 2015, @12:18PM
There is a slight monetary problem. Say the corporations have billions they could spend on ads. And the population in general is in a permanent economic decline, so you're not going to build sales organically, only by scavenging a larger slice of a permanently shrinking pie. This is the consumer situation in a nutshell.
So for consumer sales you have to convince the CEO that the ratios of ad bucks to sales and the long term effect of too many ad bucks chasing too few revenue dollars are unsustainable. I'm not sure that's necessarily true. Look at something like $1000 tennis shoes and $5000 car rims vs poor people. It seems the way of the future, that eventually we'll all have no money while being bombarded with ads trying to convince us to spend money we don't have. Its a higher level economic system failure, you can't exclusively fix just the advertising sector, or rephrased I can't think of a way to fix the ad sector that wouldn't change everything else.
On the non-consumer side #1 is engineering whitepapers which are always kinda slimy, and #2 is the stereotypical engineering component online parametric search. The problem is #1 and #2 are incredibly cheap, and 99% of the budget is for #3. I'm kinda speechless about how to spend #3 levels of money on #1 and #2 ad outputs. You could replace pdf files of amplifier transistor spec sheets with online videos of taylor swift bouncing around while lipsyncing as someone reads the spec sheet for her. Or parametric searches of bypass capacitors could include not just the usual max voltage, capacitance, ESR, and self resonance freq but also thumbnails of pr0n, perhaps taylor swift pr0n, to stay on track.
A lot of the problem at both scales is ratios. So at a high enough level money is allocated into local minima and local maxima based on $ revenue vs $ ad spend, for example. They're very local, local min and local max, and almost never global minmax results, but what is a risk adverse extremely short term thinker of a CEO supposed to do? You can't ask them to "do the right thing" because the purpose of a bureaucracy is specifically to filter people with morals, ethics, or independent thinking skills out before they get to the top. Its going to require a major system reboot to fix things.
Maybe after the upcoming web 2.0 crash. The unicorns are already dying. Looks like another down leg in the great recession coming up too. Historically that kind of thing flushes out a lot of malinvestment.