First blog of December with the delay due in part to my vacation trip to the UK.
Well now I'm sitting in a rental flat in London, jet lagged and ready to rant. So what's got me bent out of shap this time....advertising overload !!
Now for a media guy to critisize too much advertising is of course sadly ironic. Just last week members of the Just Media team where brainstorming what disruptive additional advertising could we inflict on airport passengers as part of a campaign to reach busy travellers.
However today as I sat inside one of the new fleet of London buses, now equiped with on board TV screen showing ads for Typhoo Tea and various other unfortunate products I realized it's not always a positive thing...why you ask?
Well as I tried in vain to point out interesting landmarks, my two kids could hardly be convinced to take their eye's off the damn screen. As I looked around the bus, about half the passengers looked passively into the moving pictures...great for the advertisers but a little sad none the less (the content was not exactly award winning)
I had similiar feelings a few weeks earlier when I attended one of the Oakland Raiders games. OK so perhaps I should have been grateful for stops in the action, but honestly it's hard to be kept captivated in an experience when play is stopped or delayed for nothing more than a promotion from Budweiser, Burger King or Coke.
I guess my point here is that in these cases, whilst the advertising is obviously achieving some of it's goals, at what point as an industry do we decide we are killing the hand that feeds us. Consumers deserve fewer but better advertising, placed around media that adds to an experience rather than just hijacks it. I don't mind ads around sports but please don't let it start reducing the experience I've come to enjoy. At that point my view of those brands is not exactly positive...
and I never did get my cup of tea :-(
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2 comments:
I sat in a restaurant with BZ co-founder Alan Zeichick yesterday and there was a large TV on behind him. It was very hard to concentrate and be in the moment - espacially when one ad showed a woman repeatedly undressing (cannot remember the product, so what does that tell you). My recollection of the lunch was one of jumbled disjointedness. And the resolution not to go back to that restaurant.
Harumph
Obviously undressing women in ads is always likely to attract attention but distract from remembering the product (unless it's Victoria Secrets).
However the point is relevant to this issue of having ads that are relevant to the content or context in which they are seen.
To this point I've added adsense ads to the blog. This is to see just how well Google match teh ads to the content...
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