Today I read an interesting article regarding ads in online video by Christine Beardsell. She makes lots of good and interesting points, which I thought would be a good way to lead into an idea I've got bouncing around my own head.

One important point she makes is that just sticking (I'm paraphrasing here) overlay ads over online video will not capture people's imagination and fewer will click on them! The other important point she makes is this ad agency obsession right now to "chase the viral". Ad agencies love viral campaigns, why? Because they are (usually) cheap, or at least that's the idea. "Let's do something quirky, funny, slightly rude, oddball, weird, put it on video, upload it to YouTube and watch the campaign take off, all this for only $10k!" Nice in theory, but most viral campaigns that have taken off no one could of predicted, and can't be manaufactured, and not only that, the world can only take so many dumb idea viral video's. Once you have seen 1 mentos vid you have seen them all. So I completely agree with her on this point.

Her main thrust though seems to be this utopian ideal of "opt in" advertising. Advertising which is initiated by the user and not by the media. Based on the DataPortability.org idea of being able to take your own personal data with you wherever you may venture around the net. Of course in an ideal world she would be absolutely right. But there's a few problems with this argument. The first is Dataportability itself, i.e will it ever happen? I've written before that I think eventually it will, because it seems a natural end point for all these social communities that are out there, but even though it will be good for the user ultimately it will not be good for the big social networks, and for that reason alone I can see there being a long and drawn out battle to make it a reality.

Next is the advertising industry itself. The "ram it down their throats until their eyeballs explode" approach to advertising is the standard model, whether it be online or off. Because everyone knows if people have a choice, people choose to turn off ads, which is why people are largely not given that choice. If anything advertising is taking the "standard" model even further using targeted advertising based on where we went/did/spoke to/looked up/bought. 

Btw, I've gone off track, back to my idea. I've often pondered to myself that, what with life becoming so fast and with so little time to actually absorb anything, if brands want us to watch/play/listen to whatever it is they are advertising, shouldn't they pay US? I know there's one social network on here that actually pays users for browsing and using the network, could this be the future? I think this could be the real revolution in advertising, not so much about brand content being bought by data currency but with users time being actually bought with real money! And when you think about it, this approach makes perfect sense and is already being used anyway (in a way). Website owners already make revenue from CPM, from people not actually doing anything other than just GOING to a site and loading a page where an ad resides. So there we have an example where a users time (the few mins they choose to spend on a site) is actually worth something, but unfortunately with the current model the user doesn't get the money, the website does. I can see a situation 10 years from now where people sign up to a network (lets say its called "timeequalsmoney"), which contains all their personal data (ala Dataportability.org). Brands bid for users to view their ads. Just by viewing an ad I'm giving the brand my time AND (depending on what I allow) access to my data, which in turn allows them to profile and better target me with their products/services. In return I don't feel I'm wasting my time viewing whatever the ad is. The result would be much higher quality (and targeted) advertising.

Maybe it's a crazy idea, but it's something to think about :)

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