In his article Advertising Is Broken Steven Spalding points out that most of what makes up internet advertising is based solely on the principle of disruption.
It looks for you while you’re ambling around without any particular desire in mind and has lights and sounds and colors jump out at you and try to make you want to buy something. Most of the time we forget or ignore these suggestions unless, of course, we already wanted to buy what they’re selling in the first place.
As he points out this is a woefully inefficient means of reaching a client. You need only to look at impressions vs clicks for what amounts to a month of advertising in the image above to note that it’s very clearly not the most efficient way to reach someone with only .03% of 115,000 people clicking on the ad. I should also note that ad above is a facebook ad targeting engaged women in a specified age range and geographic region. I’m not saying that it doesn’t work but it’s certainly not targeted to the best of it’s ability. Steven has some interesting ideas on what might work including:
what I need is a system that allows me to easily collect my own consumer behavior and lets me identify the brands that I like and use. More than a recommendation service, where I could pull a list out of thin air, this profile would be directly linked to me as an individual. When someone who trusts me (for whatever reason) wants to know about my consumption habits they can go to this page and see my ambient consumer behavior.
Imagine if you could find out what type of cameras an expert photographer uses or figure out the type of oil your buddy who is obsessed with cars puts in his.
That sort of smacks of the type of information that Facebook and Google can already collect on us as consumers. Be sure to read the full article it’s an interesting retrospective with an interesting idea in an interesting age of advertising. What do you think? Is advertising broken?
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