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A new and much more efficient search and a more connected world is making all advertising the equivalent of junk mail and telemarketing. Search will be efficient enough shortly that it won’t even be powered by targeted advertising.
I see Zune as a subscription based content exchange. A content producer should be able to, with some screening, have the service host any type of content (i.e. OnLive style gaming) for free and then be paid for each second an end user spends interacting with that content. The service is free to hold back a portion for profit and operating costs and might in the early years offer some small extra incentive to specific bits of content but otherwise the treatment should be generic. The service is like a discount online stock broker. Advertising no longer augments the ability to offer content, it attempts to compete with content in a way that undermines content. If your customers can be bothered with advertising your service needs to become more compelling.
Going forward two modes of advertising make the most sense. In one, a company simply provides the product for free to a subset of the population. If they like it they tell their friends about it, people are allot more connected now days. The other is to pay the person for their attention through a microtransaction or other direct payment mechanism that leaves the potential recipient free to avoid all such interactions by predefined choice (I do no wish to see ads check box.) If they don’t want their information shared with 3rd parties its an extremely strong bet that they don’t want hear from those parties while trying to use the service.
People like services that give them a sense of empowerment. Advertising in both its method and result leave them feeling like they lack something. The PC was an example of empowering the end user. Google was in part successful simply because it had a clean front page. It was also successful because any money grubbing was very targeted or easy to avoid, nothing modal or in people's faces- often it was users being proactive in their search empowered product education. More and more we see that the new search is becoming efficient enough to do without ad revenues. That seems to be part of what IBM is aiming at with its Watson technology. WolframAlpha achieves some of the same empowerment and tailoring of search. Don’t pester people with things that they neither need nor want, that will associate the service with a sense of regrette or remorse.
Don’t allow advertising to warp the priorities or functionality of the service. People already pay for the service, they need to be able to check a clearly marked option that will turn off all ads with no diminishment in service- can‘t penalize them for what isn‘t right in the first place. There might also be a setting that lets people select a floor price per second for ads they are willing to watch and this will be credited like a microtranaction to the user’s debit or credit card and not to a points account. Ad isn’t will to pay the rate, it doesn’t appear. This should never be allowed to become a way to pay for the service. Advertisers should never be treated as sponsors. Remember the goal should be to get rid of the ads not encourage them because they cheapen the service and make it less compelling and efficient. This is part of keeping intelligent people on board. Traditional advertising should be looked at as a form of theft or at least relative to the competition users of the service should come to see that reality. Again its really a theft of time and attention that also subject customers to the risk of ultimately un needed and unwanted purchases. Imagine a city free ways so jammed with unneeded and unwanted bill boards that they are generating gridlock and traffic deaths. What’s the perception of that city, what’s the impact of property (content) values? Does it really matter if they are casino or adult club ads? Its not about clutter its about getting rid of the practice.
When it comes to serving customers and grabbing share the old parasitic one way media/medium practices have to drop off. That means partners from older media have to reform or not come on board, make it easy for them but don’t let them bring their vices. Think of Hulu, Blu-ray, the game console mechanism for leaving developers and customers with the short end of the stick. All the market will bear doesn’t apply when it comes to customer loyalty and respect and good will for the brand. Xbox live is already being trashed* with this stuff, maybe the Zune infusion can reverse this.
One way to placate a company that really wants to associate its business with the brand is to make it easy for a customer that wants to use the service to shop to find product information of ad quality and to be able to make an instant purchase. What does Amazon do with ads? Well it doesn’t manage its product rankings in a very honest way but it does keep the ads down.
There will be high brow arguments about avoiding ads being bad for the system, as going against the grain. There is enough incentive to keep people active, its built into the very nature of a system based on money. This would hold even if the advertising industry folded and every form of traditional ad went away. Some of those high powered ad minds would be better off in the class room The ad companies will be desperate soon. If there are people in the organization that just don’t get that this sort of barrel scraping is sort of like pushing crack then just get rid of them, it might help them to think more critically on the matter.
*On that site ads started appearing in a way that makes them had to distinguish from content. So the end user clicks on what they they thought was a piece of content and gets a Head and Shoulders ad. Immediately and transparently this communicates dishonesty and lack of trust and also a sense that the service has gone down in quality by some undetermined amount without a corresponding reduction in price and that its done so unilaterally. In another case after a side scroller arcade game demo there was a long modal ad that one couldn't get out of by pressing any of the buttons on the controller, I had to turn it off the 360. Worst of all this was apparently a taboo subject on the feedback forums because it was wrongly asserted that the ad producer was a sponsor. As a group end users have to come first.
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