The Death of Advertising
medium.com
medium.com
The headline is click-bait; I would love a world in which ads, useless things which only annoy me, cease to exist. They do not offer me utility or value. I already know what I want, and when I don't I /then/ use a search engine.
Brand names are also a form of consumer protection. In that respect I believe they shall remain.
Let's take this ad-less world to its logical extreme. Burn down the billboards; remove all the signs on any buildings announcing "Wal-Mart" or "Sleepy Valley Hospital", so on and so forth; design and paint every building so it's the perfect shade of uniformity; strike down any person that so chooses to wear any clothing but our perfect shade. Because anything else is an advertisement, a representation of what that property or brand has to offer... and we don't want that. Perfect. Now we can live in peaceful search-supported bliss.
The world is complex, but it's not so complex as to not understand that ads serve a purpose. Try looking at it from a different angle. Because as much as I hate useless ads, I love useful ads.
So I, lamprey-like, gain the benefit of their feeding on the airwaves and ads, and I get the good stuff. That said, if I had no friends to rely on, I'd rather be cut off from novelty than be inundated with advertising, the latter of which I find intolerable.
Ads, in the broadest definition, are not going anywhere, no matter how much we push them into the shadows. As much as I hate being inundated with ads, at least I know that they're ads. Know what I hate even more? When you can't distinguish ads. So the more we tip the scale from explicit advertising, the more we welcome indistinguishable inline, sponsored, content advertising. Where you start asking yourself, are they being paid for this?
That's just one effect that we're already seeing.
I don't know whether we'll reach a steady-state for ad blocking or not. Regardless, it doesn't keep me up at night; I'm perfectly content watching others burn themselves. I just wish they'd do it quicker.
Why don't people use site-blockers instead of ad-blockers, i.e., they don't get the content if they don't want the ads. Problem solved, and we can accelerate faster to whatever point we're headed to.
When ads don't just mean, "Hey look at this, buy this shit!", but means, "An integrated system to identify and track you, collate said data, form a profile, then sell said profile, to people who may be so irresponsible that they have loud autoplaying ads, or even malware ads..." well... then it's different.
Maybe the issue is that we need to stop talking about "Ad-Blockers". I don't know about anyone else, but my time to be reasonable and play along with advertisers and content providers was back when I had none of the power, and they were busily screwing me. Now that the tables have briefly turned, I'm supposed to be the civic-minded one?
No. I remember a time before all of this content, and if the end of advertising means an end to it (which it doesn't, but lets say that it does) then I can live with that.
We are in agreeance, should the end of web advertising lead to the end of large swathes of content, we can live with that.
There are enough: 1) really good recorded albums, 2) good TV shows, 3) excellent films, 4) great books, 5) fun, engaging, possibly even enriching video games already in existence that I can't possibly get to all of them in a lifetime. If new media gets bad enough I can simply abandon it. Bring it on—it'll be unfortunate, but I'm already on wondering whether the effort of searching for good new media isn't less efficient than mining the past, so it's entirely possible it'll improve my life. Go ahead. I'll tune out.
The last person I'd ask for advice about what to buy is a salesperson.
Besides which, in an ad-less world, how would a search return ads? :) It would return independent and unbiased product reviews.
> Let's take this ad-less world to its logical extreme ... design and paint every building so it's the perfect shade of uniformity; strike down any person that so chooses to wear any clothing but our perfect shade
This is not a "logical extreme"; this is a straw man that fell down a slippery slope.
> ads serve a purpose
The purpose of convincing me to buy things I wouldn't otherwise have bought, which they do by lying, misrepresenting, dissembling, and psychologically manipulating. (Especially Internet advertising.) I feel no obligation to support that purpose, especially when pursued using those means.
Much like OP, if there's something I want, I go and research it, or use a community or activity related site (Reddit, BikeRadar/Polygon etc), where there's community discussion and conversation on what's good, bad, relative differences etc. For the most part, this means you get the actually better product, not the one with the biggest advertising spend.
No it's not a perfect system, but it's far better than being spammed with ads for things I "don't know I want", which is a spectacularly absurd concept.
I have a startup with a new product. No one knows about the company or the product, but they have a basic desire. That desire can currently be fulfilled with other options. But our offering is vastly different, in fact it's never been done before, and the only way you can realize you need it is by experiencing it. That's why we started the company. How do I get the product to them?
They don't know that they want this product.
I can assure you though, once they experience it, they don't know how they lived without it. Although they never thought to ask for it because it was literally an unknown unknown.
This isn't a hypothetical, this is a real-world example from my brother's company. And I can tell you, targeted advertisement was insanely effective.
I'm open to hear other possible ways to get the same ROI using another method.
That is part of the problem with modern advertising: hyperbole. By definition, if people have survived this long without knowing about Product-X then they don't need it. The OP's perspective was that he'd rather not know about Product-X ahead of need-time.
If he identified a need or desire for a solution to a problem he would search for "grill-thing that keeps leaves out of drain" or "brace that keeps daffodils upright in the wind" and he'd stumble across your brother's product. So the product marketing strategy would be to place Product-X in places where it would likely be found by people pursuing that particular need or desire.
I found myself doing that recently for what transpired to be called a 'tamping rammer'.
I appreciate that's not ideal from a corporate perspective when the goal is to 'make' a market by leveraging perceived need, but that's not the primary concern of those who are fatigued by advertising.
That's like... the exact definition of good advertising. And that's what we did.
So, in 25 ish years of being connected to the world on my computer, I've impulse bought one thing.
Fuck. That.
That's all I need.
Ideally I would be able to pay for this service so that their incentive to provide quality recommendations would align better with the business model
Brands are more than just a tool...they are a direct byproduct of how our brains perceive and recall things.
Human nature hasnt changed since the caveman days and never will. It can evolve and manifest itself in different ways, but our core drivers are fundamental to our existence.