When Advertising meets The Because Effect

Given the incredible materialism that passes for Christmas nowadays, I thought it would be appropriate to signal my somewhat timorous return with a random post about advertising.

I’ve always enjoyed Kathy Sierra’s blog, Creating Passionate Users. If you haven’t read it, you should. While there are many reasons to read her blog, one of the minor reasons I liked it was her use of what appeared to be 1950s and early 1960s “advertising” illustrations.

judge_1920_11_13_a.jpg

And that got me thinking. As we move to an age where the only true advertisements are recommendations, what is the role of the traditional advertisement going forward?

Recommendations I understand. They can come in many shapes and forms. People you know and trust telling you about products and services they like. A Long Tail aggregation from an anonymous population using collaborative filtering. A Wisdom Of Crowds thing where individual ratings are averaged out. A matching engine that takes your “buying” intentions and connects them with someone else’s “selling” intentions. And and and.

But what about advertisements? What possible role could they play? Despite seeing every man and his dog have an advertisement-based business model, I just couldn’t understand it. Somewhere inside me my Emperor’s-New-Clothes-Alarm kept going off.

Maybe we’re going to start time-shifting ads. Maybe the next generation of set-top boxes will allow you to set your preferences (which decade you’d like, what kind of goods or services, which region, what language, colour or not, average size, et cetera). Then, once your preferences are set (and of course you can amend them whenever) some sort of collaborative filter gets used to pump out the ads you want to see. Where you want to see them. When you want to see them.

Maybe these ads will be downloaded on to your set-top box as part of the installation process.

Have ads become a form of entertainment already? I wonder. And if so, can we have company A sponsor vintage ads put out by company B? Will there be a plethora of copyright and trade mark nonsense to follow?

It could be fun. When people realise that advertising has moved from With to Because. [If you want to know more about the Because Effect, take a look at this and this.] Continue reading “When Advertising meets The Because Effect”

on Pharma and the Because Effect

One of the joys (there aren’t too many of them) of being incarcerated in hospital depleted of energy, is the ability to read yesterday’s papers at leisure.

In yesterday’s FT there was an article on the difference in strategy between two major Indian Pharma companies, Dr Reddy’s and Ranbaxy.

Dr Reddy has been buying up component manufacturers and will partner and cooperate with anyone. As the FT article says, “this practice of supplying and partnering with other drug companies distinguishes it from rivals”.

Ranbaxy, on the other hand, “aggressively targets big drug companies with patent lawsuits.”

Intriguing. If we have more Pfizer-like instances, maybe the investors will insist on pooling of R&D risk. And all Pharma will be generic as the industry becomes coopetitive.

So how will they differentiate? How often do you accuse drug companies of being customer-friendly?

One way of differentiating: ethical pricing and distribution.

I know nothing about Pharma, but I know a little about what happens when something proprietary becomes commodity. So I shall continue to watch this space.

on locked in devices

Guess it had to happen sometime: with all my rants against device lock in, someone had to find a way of making me partially dependent on such a device.

Boy was it painful. But I’m alive and well and sore and tired. And fitted with the ultimate lock in. A pacemaker.

I think it was Churchill who said he detested the idea of old age until he considered the alternatives.

Thanks for all your wishes and prayers.I really appreciate them.

a milestone of sorts

Clustrmaps tells me that I had my 100,000th unique visitor yesterday.

It means very little right now, as an industry we have much to sort out in this respect.

The move away from page impressions to unique users. The period over which that uniqueness is defined. The role of different browsers and aggregators. The impact of corporate ISPs and firewalls. What happens when IP addresses get reused within a given time period.

In many ways it doesn’t matter to people like you and me. People who have no intention of monetising the traffic (what an awful phrase, almost as bad as content management or CRM or DEM).

But it could matter to us, and we need to take care.

Identity is a natural place to go. People will soon work out that the uniqueness is best defined by identity and not by IP address or similar.

So identity will get hijacked, from something personal to you and me, to something üsed by ad agencies to measure reach and traffic and eyeballs and I don’t know what else.

You have been warned. We have been warned.

a period of inactivity

I will be quiet for a week or two as I recuperate from some medical complications.

In the meantime, I wish all my readers and the extended community the best of the season. For those that celebrate it, Merry Christmas.

And may 2007 bring you a whole new time.