The death of advertising authenticity

What's with all of the sensationalist titles recently? I'm starting to learn to avoid any article whose title sounds like "the death of," "the most amazing," "the end of", "x is the new y," "the biggest," "the _____ your business will fail without," and so forth. It's patronizing and offensive. Thank you, but I will decide for myself exactly how bombastic your content is. The revelation that buying ads next to spammers makes your business seem less legitimate is not the "death" of anything except the 2 minutes I spent reading it.

The article makes a good point, but I don't think I'd call it the death of authenticity. A deceptive banner ad is just the new version of a fast-talking door-to-door salesman. It's the method of reaching consumers with the lowest barrier to entry, and that's why it is so popular with the inauthentic.

In the days of expensive print advertising, the investment required to take out an ad was often enough of a barrier to legitimize a business to consumers. The model has changed, but I believe consumers are still looking for companies that make some kind of investment to prove their authenticity. The new version of the expensive print ad is the investment in time and effort required to gain the trust of industry experts and influencers.

This is just plain wrong. The authenticity provided by expensive spending is still there. When something becomes cheap to buy (advertising in papers) and its authenticity had been based on it being expensive, well then it's authenticity is gone along with its high prices.

When something reliably vets its advertisers, that can have greater authenticity then is provided simply by high add rates. For example, TWIT and PA and many other blogs/podcasts/comics vet their advertisers. And their audience trusts them and extends that trust to the advertisers - priceless.

Somewhat simplistically stated, but nonetheless rings true. The ease in which you can slap together a simple banner ad, or rig up some cheap, malware-infested flash game, has rather seriously impacted the reputation of online advertisers.

Somewhere along the way, marketing forces've forgotten that reputation is often just as important as exposure - that there is, in fact, such thing as bad publicity. At least, in the long-term.

That's not the death of authenticity. That's oversaturation. That's a lot of people cynically turning marketing from something useful and benevolent into a wasteful game.

Organic growth is the real goal of advertising. When you make an ad, what you should be doing is figuring out what people need and telling them how your thing will help them. You get a customer, they find a service. Win-win. Advertisers do more than that, and they profit in the short- and middle-term, but that sort of thing is doomed to fail as people grow wiser.

I am a fan of authenticity, after all it's hard not to be. But I just don't know (a) how important it is (b) what it even means, especially as your company grows.

Where's the "authenticity" in the biggest corporations making tonnes of money? And does not having authenticity make you unauthentic? I am not sure.

Is authenticity another way of saying if your product rocks, you won't need to do marketing? True in some cases, not so in others.

Another point, though, is that the Internet is actually making harder to buy legitimacy -- and all to the good.

We know the successful story in Internet ads is not the banner ads but the Google text ads. Text ads aren't for buying legitimacy but for spreading information. Those with something of inherent value just want to tell you about it. Those who sell carbonated corn syrup they associate with a "life style" want to buy legitimacy. Which is better?