Curiouser and Curiouser! on advertising

Great marketing ideas #232

Sun, 10 Apr 2005 21:19:18 +0100

I just caught an advert for chewing gum. The advert had a guy walking along the street and come across a pack of gum in a bear trap. After a momentary pause the guy tries to grab the gum and gets his arm snaffled by the trap. White coated scientists observe this and chalk up another "grabber" on a big blackboard. It also records one non-grabber.

Watching along it wasn't hard to guess that the guy wouldn't kick over the trap to get the gum. Is the message "If you're a total halfwit buy our gum."?

I must be the no-grab guy.

I don't like ads in feeds

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 17:25:57 +0000

I just loaded the eWeek Macintosh feed and noticed something odd looking about it. It took me a moment to realise that each post had an advert. The total effect is to make it look fugly. An advert-per-item RSS feed is never going to work with me. I won't put up with that level of noise to signal ratio. What's even worse is that this is an exercpted feed so I get one line of the article and a 4-line advert. Dumb!

What does advertising have to do with Identity?

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 22:55:58 +0100

I'm really starting to love Don Dodge's Next Big Thing blog. I've referred to 3 or 4 of his posts on our internal Teampage about Software as a Service (SaaS), investment, and now Google & Yahoo's problems with advertising.

Advertising, truly context sensitive advertising, is very closely related to identity. To give you an advert that really reflects your interests (you know that insanely rare kind of advert that you were actually glad you saw) requires considerable knowledge about you and your interests. The kind of knowledge that only you have. The kind of knowledge that you really don't want to give to marketers for fear of how they'll abuse it and you!

At PAOGA we are centred around the idea of giving every individual convenience with control for their online life. This flows from our 3 core values:

Trust - we have to earn this by always doing the right thing
Control - this is what we give you
Convenience - the reason why

Convenience is the goal, letting you make better use of your total identity and giving you the control you need to do this within your own, individual, comfort zone.

For some people that comfort zone might be "no advertising at all please" but for others they will be happy to see offers that really do relate to their life and how they live it. What they need is a safe way to share information about themselves such that their privacy and tolerances are not violated.