Can Advertising Be Made Useful?

Tim O’Reilly makes some interesting remarks about how to make advertising more useful.  I have to wonder though how much damage has been done by the constant attempts to grab people’s attention with advertising using cheap gimmicks and generally annoying people (popups, flashing images, distracting animations etc).  A huge number of people have become accustomed to just totally ignoring advertising.  I know that I don’t care how good an offer an ad puts in front of me anymore or what the ad does to get my attention I ignore it.  The only message I get out of web advertising these days is that I hate web advertising.

Web advertising suffers from this more than any other form but the effect does expand to other forms of advertising.  I listened to a podcast from IT Conversations today (the closest I get to radio these days) and it had an ad at the start and end – I couldn’t tell you what the ad was for though, I just totally tuned out to it.  I know it was pushing some special deal but I don’t know what the company was or even what service they offered.

I never watch ads on TV anymore – I flick channels.  I hate it when people flick channels but I hate ads even more.

Billboards seem to be the last form of “non-conversational” advertising that actually gets through to me and you’d better make sure your billboard is witty or it’s just going to annoy me.  Oh and make sure it’s visible from traffic lights, otherwise I’ll ignore it.

I even want to hang up on companies that play ads for themselves when I’m on hold (apart from the fact that I’m on hold which is annoying, having to listen to ads is just too much).  I’ve only ever hung up once because of ads though – I was booking my car in for a service and they used the radio as their hold music but sadly choose a commercial station which played an ad for their competitor.  Paying attention to that ad saved me a bunch of money and they’ll probably never realize their mistake.

The best way to sell me your product is to make the information about it easily available when I’m looking for solutions to a problem that your product solves.  That means having a clear, easily navigable website with all the information about the product, especially price, the address for your store and opening times clearly displayed as well as an online order option (even if I have to come and pick up the goods myself, why miss an impulse purchase?).  Most importantly though you need to design your site to provide information, not to be advertising.  I don’t want to see flashy graphics or marketing spin, I want the facts.

I think the reason that Google’s adwords an other search engine ads work so well is that they appear when you are looking for something.  They don’t have to create an interest in the product, they just need to tell you the product exists and where to buy it - you already want it.  Same thing with the mechanic’s ad I got while on hold to their competitor – I was looking for a mechanic so the ad just had to tell me they existed and provide a reason why they were better, no need to create an interest.

Most other web sites don’t have that advantage though.  Providing special offers for your product is just going to annoy me if I’m trying to concentrate on reading about something else.  Being able to comment on an ad or adding annoying JavaScript drop downs that get in my way as my mouse moves around the screen won’t help either – I just don’t care about the ad, it’s in my way and the more it flashes, beeps, moves around or changes the more annoyed I’m going to get with it and the more likely that I’m going to find a way to block it.