WIRED:Rather than killing off the sales message, the internet has morphed it into something new
HOW DID we geeks get so insufferably arrogant? Well, mostly it’s because we’re so much more awesome than everyone else. But mainly it’s because for the last decade or so we’ve been gloriously right about a bunch of topics that everyone else seems to have got wrong or missed entirely.
Back in 1994, it was just painful to have everyone laugh at me because I thought the internet would be a massive phenomenon. By 2000, having grown cocky at my ability to predict the future, I was able to confidently instruct people that Google was a company to watch. By 2008, both Google and I were fringing into outright insufferability.
We were both on such rolls that I think we forgot the possibility we could be wrong about anything, ever. No wonder you hate us.
But that’s the benefit of some very selective hindsight. I was right about the internet in 1994 in general, but fantastically wrong about so much else. In particular, I was wrong about advertising. I thought that, in the age of frictionless information distribution, advertising would disappear. What were advertisements except lies that you were forced to watch instead of seeing what you really wanted?
If I wanted to see ads, advertisers wouldn’t have to pay newspapers, magazines, and TV stations to put them in front of me. I would just ask for them myself, or even pay for them. Similarly, if the products they advertised were so great, why couldn’t I find out about them more effectively from objective third parties? How wrong can you be?
Not only are there ads all over the internet, but some of the best aspects of the net are powered by advertising revenue. Google, that supposedly shiny light for the very geeks who run ad-blockers and despise marketing, is funded almost exclusively by its advertising services.
Gathered around Google are all the many free websites that depend on ads to make any money at all. Indeed, the very measurement of how media is migrating from older media to the internet is the ratio of ad spend of old media placement to new media banners. The global net ad spend is estimated to overtake newspapers in 2013; it overtook magazines in 2008 and is heading inexorably up toward television. Not that advertising in any sector is dipping. Perhaps it would have risen without the internet’s help; but the new digital age certainly hasn’t killed the beast.
Advertising appears to be leading the direction of the net. When newspapers and magazines created apps for the iPad, it was partly because advertisers were eager to spend millions as exclusive sponsors for the first apps. The muddled structure of information online, including spam blogs, search engine optimisation and domain typos, exists because advertising creates revenue opportunities simply for having people visit your website.
Was I wrong? Spectacularly. I think partly I made the mistake because I misunderstood how large the advertising market was, how pervasive and inextricably tied to content advertising is, and how easy a company like Google made switching those billions and aiming them on the net. Of course, advertising would not fade away if it’s the only paying game in town.
That said, I think I’m going to risk being wrong for another decade or so.
Despite advertising’s continuing success, my gut still says it’s a dead man walking. I haven’t seen an ad for years, thanks to ad blockers – but then, I’m a computer nerd freak. But I think advertisements are disappearing for the rest of us, too. Slowly (far more slowly than I credited) ads are forking into either entertainment or intrusions that we want to get rid of.
The entertainment is getting better, which is why we’re still fairly positive toward ads. The things we want to get rid of – annoying full screen ads, pop-ups, nagging reminders of sponsorship, and the like – are becoming less in-our-face and harmless. But neither of those two scions of advertising are advertising as we know it.
One is, effectively, sponsored entertainment. And I believe the other, fading into invisibility even as it continues to clutch to its audience, is morphing into consumer tracking.
Sponsored entertainment isn’t so bad – I think there’s a lot of consumers, and creatives within advertising, who’d be happy with that end. But tracking is a lot less consumer-friendly. Its invisibility leaves it open to temptation. If you don’t know what it’s doing, it might be doing anything: from collecting details on your every purchase, to deducing your most privately held secrets.
Advertising has been good to the modern internet, and has withstood and adapted to its disruptive ways better than many other industries. But I’m not sure the detente can stay in place for much longer. I might be wrong – I’ve certainly been wrong for the last 16 years. Then again, I could have been right all along.
