Let me preface this posting by saying that; No, I don't have/claim the answers. I have some observations, and some thoughts; the latter brought about by being (in different parts of usual day) a user, an adviser, a consumer, a marketer, and a product guy. It seems clear that the future of online advertising is likely to continue to include impressions, intersitials, sponsorships, subscription-payments with different exposure models, and probably more that none of us have even thought of yet.
But let's start with the relevant observation; of the attached picture. Whilst I *love* seeing my friends over @Threadsy advertising - for a test of adoption cycles, presumably - on Facebook, it's clear that Facebook's targeting is primitive at best. Why? I post from Threadsy, on Facebook, all the time and yet Facebook thought it relevant to advertise Threadsy to me. This is a bad move for Facebook, as I'm not clicking on an ad for something I already use. Now, if that ad was for a free year's access to a Premium account (which doesn't exist with Threadsy btw, this is a hypothetical point), then it's probably different story and I may even click; but it's not and I posit that a very tiny extra bit of classification before running the ad would elucidate the crucial facts, thus making it valuable both to Facebook and Threadsy. Right now Facebook doesn't even know what Threadsy is, i.e., if I'm posting from it, then I don't need to sign up to it again, so advertise something anew/different in those valuable pixels.
Bearing this kind of thing in mind, and the apparent fact that Facebook is already staring down $1B in revenue, it kind of makes any thought of the optimizations still possible rather staggering.
So to my thoughts; and these are fairly random, immature, jumbled...you name it... as this blog is not for profit, so tough shit if it's a mess. 1) I wonder if a Facebook can really make these kinds of optimizations. By "a Facebook" I mean companies that are built to understand you through your online presence. Of all companies to have in your mind when considering the possibilities, they know so much about your online profile already that it's rather astonishing that they make basic mistakes like this all the time. For most of the past year I was consistently targeted with dating ads, regardless of the fact that I'm in my 30's and happily married, and clicking the "dislike" button associated with those ads, regularly. Now that's probably because I don't declare that marriage in Facebook, heh (if I did, I suspect I'd receive the same hook-up ads but now with older, "dissatisfied" women). If you display a classification of adverts at me for 2 months, you should probably move on to another classification if I register zero clicks. And look at Google - they've been targeting ads at sites for years and arguably aren't much better. If you want evidence of this, take a look at Ning's Creator discussions and the vociferous opponents of Google advertising of dating services (wtf, is *everybody* on the internet just looking for a bed partner, btw?) on all the religion-fan and local-religion hookups sites there on Ning (a lot). It was fundamentally offensive to those American religion crowds to even be reminded how they get to be on the planet, and was a major failure for Ning and Google.
2) I wonder how much more advertising the world can really take. I mean, the visual landscape has already become quite overcrowded and we've already developed a pretty strong case of "banner blindness". Take a look at some of Nielsen's eye-tracking research, it's really quite interesting how internet users have figured out how to not look at adverts.
Here begins my most loosely formed thought of all. 3) I think we may do well to go back and examine inline advertising again. The difference being this time that fundamentally, display advertising has come to be regarded by plenty of consumers under a broad classification of "annoying, senseless, distracting, useless crap". And with good reason, as most of it is. A lot of it in the online world has seemingly just transitioned from TV and billboards, so is glaringly ugly, jarring and interruptive to both the eye and the mind alike. With more blindness to "classic" advertising evolving, who can deny that a change may be imminent and necessary in order to really advance things in the space? Publishing has separated "church from state" (for a great read that's way more informed, check out Paul Carr's recent piece on Rupert Murdoch) and basically never strayed since the death of those who tried and failed during the dot doom. What however, if you could deliver a service that blended a very small number of very good, relevant ads, that look far less like more shitty ads, in a way that is far less intrusive than today? Success would rely on great ad content, as you'd be going for a low volume of high value clicks, versus a scattergun of crap hoping that someone accidentally clicks (as today). In fact UberTwitter did just that when it launched, and I've even clicked on an ad that was highly relevant - it was for Vlingo (a service that transcribes voice to text/commands on your BBerry, etc). Since then, UberTwitter's ads became automated and now look like regular annoying banners.
I'd love to see us solve this one, once and for all. Then I wouldn't be forced to actively ignore all those annoying, senseless,… well you get the picture. So who's going to do this work? I think it's specialists. Assuming you're not going to have hordes of humans in new jobs writing very different ad content in the future, then you have processing work to do, so I'm looking forward to seeing the work of companies like Adchemy, and AdTeractive blend in with the products of companies like Threadsy, and more. It should be interesting, so what role will you play?