local media blog

I’m biased on this issue because I work at a media company that sells behavorial targeted banner ads and other online advertising, but I sincerely write the following as a consumer:

Advertising is important to me. It tells me what’s on sale, where and when. It tells me about new opportunities and new fashion. It helps me understand the better deals and it helps me save money (especially online advertising where I can so easily compare products and pricing).

So, when someone who is in a position of power, says something on my behalf that is just wrong I have to blog about it.

Here’s the full statement as written in MediaPost about Google’s new opt-out behavorial targeting functionality:

The U.S. Public Interest Research Group, along with the Center for Digital Democracy, spurred much of the recent public debate about online advertising and privacy by filing a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission in 2006.

Fazlullah added that she was disappointed with Google’s decision to continue with an opt-out regime–which means that only the most sophisticated, privacy-aware consumers will make use of the new controls. “If they asked people, ‘Do you really want to be followed around and served ads,’ most people would say no. Most of us don’t really value advertising in any solid way.”

Really? Most of us don’t really value advertising in any solid way. Wow. That’s a pretty damning statement of an entire industry. Did she do a study? How does she know this?

I for one value advertising in a very solid way. It pays for our journalism and it gives me information about what’s on sale at the grocery store. Maybe that’s not important to Ms. Fazlullah, but it is to me and I would venture to guess it’s important to a lot of people.

This is a common complaint from local advertisers wondering why they can’t “see” their ad on our Web pages. We calmly remind them that it’s a good thing if they can’t see it because that means a potential customer is seeing it. They nod in agreement until the next time we visit and they ask the same question.

So, what’s the solution? Ari Rosenberg from PerformancePricing.com thinks we should stop selling multiple advertisers into a single position and limit the number of positions available. He wrote more extensively about this solution on MediaPost.

His argument makes sense:

The Internet has become one gigantic Time Square, which is why advertisers continue (at an alarming pace) to place less and less value on the exposure they purchase, while overemphasizing the importance of the performance of their campaigns while holding publishers accountable for this performance.

His solution makes sense, too:

So here is what online publishers can do to help themselves before it’s too late to do so: collectively strip down their page views to two or three ad units and then sell them exclusively as a roadblock page impression. So one page view would equal one collective impression for one single advertiser.

Sounds scary. Rosenberg admits in the short-term his solution will cost publishers revenue, but the long-term results would be beneficial as the vast amount of inventory tightens, campaigns become more measurable (Ah, I can SEE my ad!), and prices rise because the VALUE has been re-established (the old supply-and-demand scenario).

Many newspapers have taken steps in this direction by limiting the number of positions on their pages. The next step is to eliminate positions or take them down to one on fringe pages and sell at a premium the remaining spaces.

We may have less advertisers but hopefully that would translate into a better user experience (less clutter) which means more “good” traffic which means better results for our advertisers which means a justifiable rate increase!