On the other, if you understand stuff, share you knowhow in the HelpMe.com Forums. Thanks! 
Yesterday I realized how many firsts our daughter Levia has had in the last couple of days: Her first sentences that begin with “I …” as opposed to “Baby …”. Running on her tiptoes. Beautiful stuff like that. If you will, read the post Don’t Count On The 2nd Chance I wrote over at HelpMe.com.
I’m sick of reading how bad economy is. Heck, what is “the economy”? Isn’t it but the sum of single business and their relations? If a single business is in trouble, then likely because it isn’t producing something useful, isn’t able to sell it or doesn’t have the funding and the stamina to survive the dip.
Maybe on the big scale it isn’t that different. Maybe we weren’t producing the things that we needed. Maybe we didn’t build good, strong relationships. Maybe we, as a society, have become crybabies and simple lack the stamina to push through this.
Now what?
Let’s talk. Robert has a talk going on at FriendFeed. Also, you can give me a tweet (twitter.com/shtikl) or join in the conversation over at the HelpMe Forum.
Dave Winer recently claimed that “Online Advertising is now dead“:
Assuming the economy comes back from the recession-depression thing that it’s in now, when it does, we will have completely moved on from advertising.
Dave writes how he was searching for a replacement carafe for his Cuisinart coffee maker:
The other day I broke the carafe on my Cuisinart coffee maker. Looked up the model on Amazon, found the related entry (”people who bought this also bought this”) — and there it is. Click the Buy Now button, whole transaction from breakage of carafe to the order, about 5 minutes. No advertising involved.
The thesis in Dave’s article, that inspired me, is this:
[...] perfectly targeted advertising is just information.
This was the most thought provoking thing I read in the last couple of days. If perfect targeted advertising seizes to actually be advertising but turns into information, what is “real advertising”?
The logical consequence is: “advertising is badly targeted information”. (I guess one would have to supplement: That wants to sell you something.)
Alternative Definitions of Advertising
I would like to suggest a refinement of Dave’s terms:
1. Advertising is information that is offered for the purpose of initiating a business relationship respectively a new transaction as part of an existing relationship.
2. Good Advertising tells me how to improve my situation (e.g. by solving a pressing problem) and is right about it.
3. Bad Advertising claims to be telling me how to improve my situation, but is wrong about it.
When Amazon tells me what “people who bought this, also bought”, they are not merely passing information. They are advertising, they are offering information aimed 100% at initiating a deal.
The reason why good ads don’t “feel” like ads is simply that we are used to so many bad ads. The makers of TV-ads and billboards are satisfied if the offered information is relevant only to a small percentage of the viewers - leaving the rest of the viewers unaffected or, at worst,w annoyed.
Google and Amazon have changed this. Because the consumer enters data on what she is looking for in that precise moment, it is easier to offer ads that “don’t feel like ads”, because they are relevant, because they actually improve a situation.
Faking Salesman’s Intuition
Amazon, advertisers on Google Adsense and Netflix are taking this one step further. They try to imitate the experienced salesperson who “just knows” (from years of frontline experience) that a customer who says he wants to buy A, would also be ready to buy C, D and maybe E.
The mentioned companies don’t have the technology to imitate human intuition (they sure are trying!), but they found a workaround: they assume that most humans are structured similarly, and if person #1 liked A and B, person #2 liking A will be structured similarly and maybe also like B.
Advertisers on Google Adsense can bid on keywords. They can ask their ads to be displayed every time a certain keyword was entered as a search term. This should/could simulate the “also bought”-formulae: in an ideal world advertisers would bid only on a keyword if their product was relevant to the problem describe by the keyword. In the world as it is, advertisers usually start with the product at hand (what else should they do?) and then think of keywords they can stick their product to. That beat’s the purpose and turn Google Adsense into “bad advertising”.
(A way to skew the Amazon “also-bought” system would maybe be to buy product A and product B on a big scale, maybe to return it later, and thus game the recommendation system. I wonder if anybody already did it.)
Bad Advertising Is Dead
Bad advertising is very expensive. You have to pay for placement, for clickthroughs, and the customers you might dupe into buying from you aren’t the kind of loyal customers that make a business thrive in the long term.
In the time of cookies, search terms, signing up for most sites, and customers openly sharing their interests with the world via Web 2.0 applications, non-targeted ads are less than a necessary evil: they are unnecessary. Presenting ads to people who likely will not be interested is pure laziness.
This kind of laziness is costly in many ways: You are paying to annoy customers, of which some could have bought from you had you offered that information at a more appropriate time. And you are missing many a chance to sell to customers who are looking for exactly what you are offering.
But bad advertising isn’t merely a waste of money. It also has a actively negative effect on your business. Bad advertising eats up the resource most needed in a recession: cash, just to actively harm your business.
That’s why I would agree with Dave: bad advertising, together with the companies indulging in it, won’t be here when economy comes back.
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