Tag: Internet Advertising

The most amusing thing about the whole MoveOn.Org SuperBowl ad controversy had to be this assertion from MoveOn.Org,

At 8:10PM and 8:35PM EST, switch over to CNN to watch ‘Child’s Pay’ on a channel which doesn’t censor its ads.

In fact, CNN has a long history of refusing politically-tinged advertisements,

Opponents of a proposed treaty on global warming have criticized CNN for dropping advertisements denouncing it.

. . .

The panel decided that because coverage of the global warming treaty was growing more intense, and the ads were becoming part of that coverage, the ads should not run on CNN.

Both CNN and CBS, of course, have the right to refuse whatever ad they want for any reason, but to my mind CNN’s policy is far worse than CBS’s.

CBS, to its credit, takes an even-handed approach — it simply doesn’t accept any ads on controversial issues,

This policy applies only to Network advertising, not to the local time of individual stations affiliated with the Network. As such, it is therefore also intended to promote and protect localism. Local stations we own, as well as CBS affiliates owned by others, are free to accept or reject such advocacy advertising for their own air based on how they believe such decisions serve the public interest in their communities.

Conflicts over the policy are also decades old. The Network has rejected hundreds of advocacy ads over the years ranging from Mobil Oil and W.R. Grace Company submissions to ads on all sides of issues from gun control to abortion to the North American Free Trade Agreement, to name just a few. We have found that people tend to agree with the policy when they disagree with the thrust of the ad, and vice versa.

Suggestions have also been made that we are violating our own policy by allowing the airing of messages that aim to curb drug abuse and smoking by minors. CBS is unaware of responsible groups that advocate drug abuse and smoking by minors, so it is hard to understand how these laudable efforts would constitute “controversial issues.”

CNN, on the other hand, has an inconsistent policy for accepting or rejecting ads on controversial issues — sometimes it will accept them, sometimes it won’t. Sometimes it won’t accept ads on major issues it covers, sometimes it will.

Source:

CBS Statement on Advocacy Advertising. Press Release, Wednesday January 28.

Join the One-Minute Boycott of CBS. Press Release, MoveOn.Org, 2004.

CNN criticized for dropping global-warming ad. CNN, October 3, 1997.

TechTV producer David Roos was recently complaining that it was my fault that CNET had to lay off many of its staff members. See, I’m one of the people Roos complained about who don’t click on any of CNET’s ads.

Frankly, like Jim Roepcke, I simply don’t visit CNET much anymore because, to put it bluntly, the site really sucks. It used to be on my list of sites I had to visit every morning to keep up with the cutting edge of tech happenings, but now it consists largely of rewritten press releases and comments on earnings and pricing of high tech stocks. Boring.

But even if I were visiting the site more often, I still wouldn’t click on the ads because advertising doesn’t work, and Internet advertising is the worst of the worst.

Joseph Sobran has an insightful article on the downfall of advertising. He’s concerned with radio advertising, but all of the problems he cites are even more prominent with web advertising.

Rather than tell me something interesting about a product, I see banner ads that leave me completely clueless. Either that or the ads are completely irrelevant. Why would I want to download a white paper from IBM, as a recent CNET ad urged me to do? As Sobran writes,

What makes commercials especially annoying is that most of them are so badly done. They don’t interest you in the product or give you any useful information about it. And they certainly aren’t entertaining. The harder they try to be funny, the worse they are.

I see the ads that people pay to place on my AnimalRights.Net and Overpopulation.Com web sites and most of the time I have to shake my head and wonder what the hell these people were thinking.

So what’s a wannabe profitable corporation to do when their lousy products marketed with lousy ad campaigns fail to interest anyone? Why blame it on the Internet infrastructure, of course?

The Los Angeles Times recently ran a much maligned article describing corporations who want to turn the Internet into a toll both in an effort to make money.

The worst offender in the story has to be Thomas Nolle, identified as a “New Jersey telecommunications consultant” who says,

The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn’t excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws. The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists who didn’t have a strong profit motive. But this is a business, not a government-sponsored network.

This may sound absurd (and it is, of course), but it is also conventional wisdom within the academic communications community. Most college-level communications textbooks, for example, defend cable monopolies as necessary to avoid market failure, and before the 1980s many of these same books and authors defended AT&T’s monopoly as necessary to avoid market failure. Is it any surprise at all that these nitwits are now turning their attention to the Internet and arguing that monopoly-style regulatory schemes are the only solution to avoid market failure?

It is worth remembering how AT&T secured its long-standing monopoly — it convinced the U.S. government to semi-nationalize the phone system during World War I on the grounds that having a stable, widely available phone system was in the interests of national security. Combined with long-distance rate regulation, the government did what AT&T had been unable to do after its patent on telephones expired: kill off the companies competitors.

The one thing I don’t understand, however, is why people get upset when sevice providers such as Excite@Home announces deals to place some third party content on internal servers to provide very high speed access to multimedia content.

Some people strongly object to this as “walling off the Internet,” but how is it any different than my cable system setting up a proxy server to speed delivery of third party content that is accessed frequently? Or downloading a multimedia file and placing it on my home file server for that matter?

As far as I’m concerned that’s the right way to create private Internets along side the more public Internet. Trying to build tollbooths in to the infrastructure of the public Internet, however, is the wrong way to do this.

Kuro5hin wonders about the seemingly endless trend of selling naming rights to buildings. The Los Angeles Lakers play in The Staples Center, the Super Bowl was played in Raymond James Stadium. According to the New York Times, visitors to the St. Louis Zoo this summer will be able to visit the Anheuser-Busch Hippo Harbor along with the Monsanto Insectarium.

Unlike some critics of this, I could care less whether or not the local zoo carries the name of corporations. What does puzzle me about this, however, is why corporations are pursuing these sort of sponorships.

The New York Times suggest that large corporations view it as a form of alternative advertising. If that’s the case they might as well blow their money on web banner ads — they’d probably be as effective.

Does anybody really watch a Lakers game and then feel a compulsion to shop at Staples? Or switch your investments to Raymond James because they paid millions to name Tampa Bay’s stadium?

Personally I think this is the latest advertising industry scam to fleece corporate wallets. Which means it’s time to get in while the getting is good.

I wonder if there isn’t an angle here for us poor independent web masters. For example, for a small donation I’d be more than willing to turn the Search page here into The McDonald’s Search page. Or how about the AT&T Article Directory?

This reminds me of people who were aghast at the recent spate of stars selling the rights for photographs of their wedding to tabloid magazines for six figures and up. Are those people insane?

Tell you what, for $100,000 my wife and I will have a completely new wedding providing XLF-style access and we’ll plaster corporate logos so extensively over the wedding and reception that even NASCAR fans will wince at the product placement.

Hmmm…anybody know how to contact Rupert Murdoch? Sounds like it would make a great Fox special.

Don Larson pointed to an InfoWorld article the other day that, among other things, calls for more “disruptive” ad banners. Larson writes that, “That’s not a very good idea. A revolt would occur and I would help find way to route around such nonsense.”

The article, which reports on a speech by Silicon Alley reporter Jason McCabe Calacanis, is a fascinating look at just how completely some people fail to understand what’s happening with the Internet revolution even though they offer themselves up as experts on the phenomenon.

Calacanis suffers from what I like to call the Al Gore syndrome. Gore made the same error in his now infamous statement that he was one of the driving forces behind the Internet. In his top down, centralized, controlled view of the Internet, this is actually factually correct. The problem being that most of what people love about the Internet came from individuals and companies discarding that outmoded, old way of thinking.

According to Calacanis, for example, companies made a mistake when they “trained our consumers to believe that content is free. We standardized a failed concept. That’s how stupid we are in the Internet industry.”

Give me a break. Free content has been driven almost entirely by the demand side of the equation. Look at what happened to Slate, for example. They tried to charge for their content only to find there wasn’t much of a demand for a pay-per-view version of the site, and subsequently they switched back over to an ad banner model.

Calacanis wants to overcome this expectation of free content with what he calls more “disruptive ads.”

We have to stop users and say, ‘Before you look at my content, stop and look at this 15-second ad. And enjoy looking at it, because if it weren’t for the ad, you’d have to give me money.

I am not a very good prognosticator, but in my opinion this is the way to disaster. As Larson points out, some people will simply spend time finding ways to route around such obstacles. Programs already exist for blocking out banner ads, though banner ads are relatively unobtrusive and so few people I know go to the trouble of filtering them out. Make me wait 15 seconds, however, and I just might.

More likely, however, I’ll simply go to a competitor’s site who isn’t making me wait 15 seconds. For example, I used to read all of the new stories on MSNBC until a couple years ago when they started adding all of these ads and announcements between their home page and the actual stories. After a couple weeks I simply stopped visiting MSNBC. Such ads reportedly have very high click through rates, but over the long term I suspect the loss in audience would outweigh the short term increase in revenue.

A bigger problem is that Calacanis can’t see what is right in front of his nose. Calacanis thinks that audio and video are going to revolutionize the web. Cheap digital video cameras and powerful editing suites will make everyone a content provider. Personally I think there are a lot of obstacles to this even with the cheap hardware, software and bandwidth, but on the other hand this is precisely why Calacanis’ other models fail.

Precisely because technology is making it so easy for individuals to compete with large corporations, the corporations can no longer train users to respond like they want. Does your big corporate site make me wait 15 seconds for the content I want? Fine, I’ll go visit the site the 13 year old kid down the street has set up covering the same topic. Why didn’t Slate succeed as a pay site and why are both it and Salon struggling to stay afloat as free sites? Largely because although their sites are often both very good, they aren’t all that much better than any number of other sites run by a single person or a small group of friends who don’t have ridiculously high production costs. Give them another 3 to 5 years and they’ll be able to make a small profit on their sites — not enough to tempt the venture capital behind sites like Salon, but certainly enough to make some of the sites self-sustaining with a small staff. (The best single example of this so far is the success of The Onion.)

This article is, however, a clue to what will happen when audio and video do seriously arrive as more viable on the Internet. The large content companies are going to make the same mistakes many of them have made with their text and graphics web sites by trying to reproduce the television experience, replete with advertisements. They’ll probably think they can get away with it because they will assume their professional-looking, expensive video projects will be far superior to the stuff the independent director down the street makes on his $900 DV camera. Personally, I suspect exactly the opposite will happen. I can’t tell you the number of films I’ve seen that cost less than $100,000 to make that blew away anything the major studios had to offer (compare a film like The Last Broadcast to the major studio horror releases, for example.)