AdTension

"Attention" is getting some well-deserved attention lately. But what about its opposite? What about that class of stuff we choose, actively, to ignore? Such as: advertising.

If you use a modern browser such as Firefox or Safari, there's a good chance you're already exercizing your power to block pop-up ads. But what about selectively blocking any or all advertising? Well, Firefox has a plug-in architecture, so that's more than conceivable.

Enter the Adblock project. I hadn't heard about AdBlock until I read about the threat of it in ZDNet Australia. It begins,

Bennie Smith, the online advertising network's privacy chief, told ZDNet Australia the popularity of tools like Adblock -- an extension to the Mozilla Firefox browser -- which makes blocking online ads simple was tied to "a negative vibe against advertising in general".

Here's more:

He said if a similar tool could be produced for newspapers, it would not be accepted by consumers.

"You'd go to your local corner shop and buy the daily paper, and you'd have these large holes where the ads were.

"You'd somehow feel like your 25 cents had not gotten full value," he said.

Part of the Internet's value proposition lies in the provision of large amounts of free content. "But that content is not without cost. And that cost is my eyeballs seeing an ad on a page. Or within an e-mail, or next to my search results, or however it's going to come," Smith explained.

I can see why the guy is upset. Here's a list of Adblock prefs:

*/ad/*

*/ads/*

*/banner/*

*adtech*

*announce*

*banners*

*doubleclick*

His is the only major advertising brand in the list. (Perhaps Adtech is too, but I've never heard of them, and I can't find anything Doubleclick-like for the name in a Google search.)

I suppose I should share his concern, because this journal is (or will be) supported by advertising. So far we haven't had any, beyond the rotating sister-pub sponsor in the upper right, there. But if IT Garage gets popular enough, the ads will come.

Still, I support the concept behind Adblock: user choice. This here (Firefox, fwiw) is my browser, and I can customize it any way I please. If AdBlock works the way it claims, I'll have a choice about adding and removing Adblock, and adjusting Adblock prefs to allow or prevent display of each and every kind of ad.

The holy grail of advertising is to add, rather than subtract, value for the people who consume it: to create a demand market for itself.

Bennie Smith suggests that this is what we have with newspapers. That's true, if you're talking about classifieds, or ads targeted to readers in the market for cars and houses (two of the largest categories, dollar-wise). But most of us use our own form of Adblock to cut unwanted ads out of newspapers and magazines: we scan past them.

In some cases we do what my sister (retired from the Navy and given to sharp military language at times) calls "field-stripping" the paper. That's what I do with the Sunday LA Times, which is the size and weight of a log. You go through the thing and remove several pounds of advertising inserts and perhaps whole editorial sections as well. What's left is perfect for carrying along to the coffee shop or reading out by the pool. The remaining ads are easy to overlook — or to read, if they're actually interesting. That's the case for notifications by performance venues in the entertainment or sports sections, for example.

There are some other cases of value-increasing advertising. For trade and fashion magazines, the advertising often serves as a form of editorial. Lucky, for example, is a whole magazine devoted to fashion shopping. The line between editorial and advertising is barely there. And I've watched some women read it cover-to-cover. If you cut the ads out of Vogue, or even Linux Journal, they would be severely lessened for it.

Still, advertising is stuff its recipients don't pay for, and therefore have limited direct influence over. It would actually help advertisers to know that readers are blocking some of their ads, and also why. That's why I'd like to see some kind of notification system built into AdBlock. Wouldn't it be helpful to let advertisers know that you have negative attention for their goods: that those goods are explicitly unwanted?

The likes of Google's AdSense and Adwords are special cases. Put simply, advertisers only pay for what works. Meaning the reader is actively involved.

Still, what if the reader wants no ads, from anybody, on his or her browser page?

In The New Advertising Business, which I wrote in 2003, I saw the holy grail of advertising in sight. I still do. But only if the user, the customer, is more fully equipped to participate in the market conversation.

That's one reason I'm excited about identity services on the Net. As a customer with a browser, I would like, for example, to remain entirely anonymous as I browse, yet are known to the sites that I wish to see me (say, whose cookies I know and accept, and which contain information useful to both of us). I would also like, as an anonymous user, to reveal information such as my choice to block particular kinds of ads. Or, on the other hand, that I do seek certain kinds of information. Such as a deal on a used car.

My main point here is that we need to get out of the advertiser-centered frame of mind about how markets for information work. We need to start imagining the markeptlace as it exists now, and wants to exist, in the online world. This is a marketplace where customers are participants, and not just consumers. Where they are no longer just a mass of passive "eyeballs".

What can we do to enable conversations and relationships — and not just transactions — between sellers and buyers in a market category? This is a question we raised in The Cluetrain Manifesto more than six years ago; and we've still only begun to answer it.

What makes that question so hard to answer isn't what Bennie Smith calls "a negative vibe toward advertising". Its the persistent disdain by advertisers and media toward the customers they insult by calling "eyeballs".

Tags: identity, attention, advertising, adtension.