In recent talks and lectures, I’ve been discussing how advertising is evolving. It’s a very interesting story.
Consider the debate going on at Ad Blocker Plus. The developer feels guilty about foregone ad revenue for publishers, and wants to make a fairer approach to ad blocking. That fairer approach will let people express their preferences toward ads - it will factor in whether consumers think an ad is lame, cool, or insanely great.
What’s really going on here?
Consider Google for a second. What’s Google’s secret? Yes, it’s a got a great search engine. But the real cash cow is this: it serves ads that are vastly more relevant than rivals. How? Google doesn’t just display the ads that advertisers pay for. It also factors in whether or not people actually click on ads.
Ad Blocker Plus is on the verge of turning into an open network that (finally) does the same as Google does: massively boost ad relevance, stripping out the useless junk - by factoring in whether or not people find ads useful or not. Ad Blocker plus is, almost unwittingly, making the world’s first reverse ad network. It doesn’t aggregate ads - it aggregates people’s preferences about ads.
All of which brings us squarely back to our big theme for this year: Capitalism 2.0, which Guy has been discussing in a series of excellent posts here. The ad industry is built on an industrial era principle: waging war (on people).
War - conflict - is about force. Peace is about choice.
Google revolutionized the ad industry by waging peace. Imperfectly, certainly. Yet, when consumer preferences were factored into the value of ads, the result was disruptively more relevant ads. Advertisers, publishers - and, finally, people - were all better off. Now, Ad Blocker Plus is on the verge of waging an economically more valuable kind of peace: a more open, broader peace, which can boost relevance more significantly.
That’s a good thing for everyone - because it creates better incentives for everyone in the media value chain. And those incentives, ultimately, will lead to greater opportunities to create authentically valuable ads, that can make media itself more sustainable
