Ubiquitous Ads

I posted a little thing on Google and ads a bit ago in which I suggested that in-game ads were a bit controversial and Poyla called me on that in the comments, suggesting that every time some new way of distributing ads comes up people call it controversial but then just live with it. I started thinking about that, as something bothered me about it - but I think that’s the point - he’s completely right. The ad people’s whole job is to come up with new ways to sell ads and they’re just going to push it down our throats because we’re ok with it, ultimately. We squawk at first but eventually we’re so used to seeing ads it doesn’t take us very long to acclimate ourselves to the new spots.

I was thinking of examples of things that don’t have ads. The first one I started thinking of was movies - being so similar to games. Terrible idea. Remember when you didn’t have to sit through commercials before the movie? No? Well, that was a long time ago, if you can remember those dusty times there also a commotion about essentially paying your fee to see the movie and then being forced to watch commercials. Personally, I don’t mind them when they show up before the viewing time, but most theaters start them at the time the movies supposed to start which is tired. Of course you also get to see clever product placements throughout the movies and that’s only getting more and more prominent.

Look at magazines and newspapers, you can’t turn a page without seeing ads. Again, things that you’ve paid for - you’ve paid to give yourselves ads. Honestly, I’m surprised that we aren’t seeing ads in books yet, although I strongly suspect that’s coming as soon as e-books start to take off in the mainstream. I can not imagine a world in which any significant portion of people are reading books on an electronic device that doesn’t have ads.

Remember when people were upset about seeing ads in Gmail? That was quite a flap that day! Wow, people were pissed, privacy this, privacy that. Doesn’t seem to have stopped anyone from using Gmail. Yahoo puts ads right on the emails you send out. That’s right, you send your friend an email from your Yahoo account and there’s an ad right at the bottom of your email. People hated that for a day or so, too.

I mean, seriously, remember when people were pissed about seeing ads on websites?? The web is free! Information is free! Why have you put a banner on your website! Yeah, that lasted. Or the people who railed against the ad networks for tracking movements from site to site. Heh! Awesome, now they’re signing up for services to do exactly that.

As Poyla says, it’s ad people doing what ad people do. I’m sure the future holds lots more advertising for us. I think sporting events presage a whole new in-show advertising - where those banners you see on tv are actually digitally painted. How long before the canned beverage someone’s drinking on the show gets delivered dynamically to your home - your zip code shows that you statistically probably prefer the champagne of beers, so that’s what you get to see the hero drinking. And that’ll bring it full circle with in-game ads.

Sure there will always be people who hate all this stuff. There’ll be people who grab ad blockers and use them to the fullest extent they can. But for most of us, most of the time it just means more and ever more ads assaulting our eyeballs.

Oct 30th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: ads