AdTension
Submitted by doc on Sat, 06/25/2005 - 00:51.
*/ad/*
*/ads/*
*/banner/*
*adtech*
*announce*
*banners*
*doubleclick*
"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:
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.
Maximo Park
Maximo Park mp3 music download - Girls Who Play Guitars, The Unshockable, Nosebleed...
sürücü kursu | ehliyet | ehliyet kursu |
sürücü kursu | ehliyet kursu | motosiklet ehliyeti
sürücü kursu | motosiklet ehliyeti |
sürücü kursu | motosiklet ehliyeti
ehliyet sınav yerleri
Subtracting Ads
Wasn't Ad blocking invented with the TV remote control? We learned to switch channels when the predictable flurry of ads was about to interrupt our Bonanza or Dukes of Hazard show. Blocking ads with a program like the one I've used for years, AdSubtract, isn't much different than switching them away with the TV remote, except it's more automated and precise. Online advertisers blew it. Many ad serers and web sites laden with ads chose to exploit that power to their maximum ADvantage. To throw as much at us viewers as we could take. We went thru the popup wars, now solved by a myriad of tools starting with the browser. The double-wide, skyscraper and other huge formats continue to shrink useful screen real estate. For me it's all about choice. I choose to broadly block all ads, banners, pop-ups, multimedia, and even search ads on Google and Yahoo, (a nice feature of AdSubtract). But what is an ad? It is in the eye of the beholder. The push model went out of style years ago, I prefer to pull only content I want to see.
IAB
IAB.net has no results for a search on "adblock".
But there is this funny page:
"Most Pop-up blocking software will stop Pop-ups on www.iab.net from opening. Most of the Pop-up blocking software can not tell the difference between good pop-ups and bad ones."
Good pop-ups: our pop-ups.
Bad pop-ups: our members' pop-ups.
The Internet advertising industry hasn't had to react to ad blockers because the number of users running them has been small. Some possible reactions include...
(1) sites will check and reject ads that blink too fast or have excess repetitive animation -- nothing makes your "block images from this server" finger itch like CLICK THE MONKEY AND WIN AN iPOD!!!!
(2) Ads might still be hosted by an outside provider, but they'll be served from \w+.example.com instead of \w+.doubleclick.net or ads.example.com. This means no more cross-site cookies for Doubleclick, which is their main privacy issue. This also means that the ad server and the content server will share cookies, so it'll be easy for sites to tell who's blocking ads -- and maybe serve those users an interstitial page.
I've been doing this for years
Long before AdBlock came along, I picked up a utility called Naviscope that has, by my default settings, been blocking ads, backgrounds, blinking text, pop-ups (delay or total), hiding my UserAgent, Referrer, blocking cookies, javascript/jscript, and sounds. It's also does programmable (delayable) prefetches ;-). Been around forever, since the '90's, free, and I believe unsupported now. It doesn't matter. It gives me choice as to which sites get what, and especially, which sites know whom/what/where.
As for what M. Smith says, well all I can say is that his corporation (DoubleClick) managed to create the most offensive advertisements on the web, commit the most egregious invasions of privacy for personal profit, and otherwise offend nearly everyone. And he wonders why people are grabbing weapons of mass (advertising) destruction in response? Get a clue! On the other hand (we economists always say that ;-), Google provides ads that are unobtrusive unless I actually desire to look at them (unblocked here, nods to Google!), are relevant to what I'm doing or where I am at, and require a commitment from the advertiser to buy my attention without offending my, and Google's, standards.
Google is set to surpass the entire annual revenue of all the US television broadcaster's ad revenues combined this or next year. Who has the successful business model? Who does not? That's the free market M. Smith. Crawl back under your rock, please.
Brian J. Bartlett
Advertising on demand
There wouldn't be holes in the newspaper without ads, there would be just news. Just as all I have on my browser is what I have actively sought out, not what someone else wants me to see.
Putting it more generally than technically: Say I want to find out where blueberries are on special this week. Yes, it would be on a grocery store ad in the paper, but it would also be in their window, and on a flyer in the store and - if they were thinking about me - on their web page. But if I wanted blueberries, I'd find out. Because I chose to be a blueberry customer.
The marketing folks want me to be an eyeball; they're not interested in whether I actually want blueberries or not, they just want me to buy blueberries. And to do that they believe I must be seduced/induced into wanting blueberries.
The internet equivalent of the flyer that falls out of your paper is the pop-up. And just as I field strip my paper before reading it (or TiVo the shows I want or fast forward past ads or even just mute them), I field strip my browser. Does that mean I don't shop? I don't buy - on line or else where? Of course not; but it does mean that I am in control of the advertising I see.
And that loss of control is the big issue for the world of advertising.
So here is my idea: A search engine for advertisements.
Imagine if I wanted to buy a TV. Yes, I'd do my homework - consumer reports and other sources of comparative analysis. But now I'm ready to buy. I know I want a certain size, make, maybe even model. But say I live in Arlington, VA and there are a zillion dealers, from Best Buy to the a corner appliance store to Amazon. What if I could go on the 'net and search the current advertisements? Both the online AND the local stores? A current "best deal" from all who wanted to advertise?
Advertising on demand.
Back to the 4Ps
Most marketeers will have comeacross the idea of the 4Ps in their careers - it's the shorthand to identify the areas that marketing has traditionally been concerned with - Price, Place, Product, Promotion.
During the last 30 years marketing has become obsessed with just one those Ps : Promotion and specifically advertising.
That was all great in an era of mass production but now markets have changed and marketing must follow.
Many people seem to feel that the death of promotion as an effective tool must mean the death of the marketing industry but of course marketing will be around for as long as markets themselves exist.
The marketing industry needs to go back to the drawing board and the 4Ps isn't a bad place to start.
Ads I want
I'm not the only one to ask this. But I would really like an RSS feed purely of adverts but for a specific keyword or three. Let's say I'm researching or trying to keep abreast of activity around "embedded linux". I'm probably already taking feeds from technorati, topix, google news (ahem) on those words. If I could also get a feed from Google Adsense, Overture and Doubleclick of anyone targetting those words, I'd pick up information about new advertisng campaigns and hence new developments that companies in the space were trying to market. I'll probably produce a much higher clickthough rate because I've already pre-selected myself as someone who's motivated to find out more.
This turns the advertising model on its head. Talking to people in agencies in this space they have real trouble getting their head round it. Partly because it removes a whole intermediary from the chain which is the publisher with the advertising inventory.