Fools rush in where angles fear to tread!

Jun 11
19:07

2007

Paul Ashby

Paul Ashby

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We must always keep uppermost in our mind that they do not go onto the net to watch advertising, no matter how well it is disguised, they go to the net to go elsewhere and to lol at the latest cat swimming video!

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And exactly where are advertising agencies rushing to at the moment?

Why Web 2.0 of course!

So be very careful because the signs of a backlash against The Internet are already beginning to emerge.

To start with the Web was not designed as a mass medium to be used and abused by Corporations and Advertising Agencies.

Then along comes Google outlining their plans for the most outrageous abuse of privacy and the future,Fools rush in where angles fear to tread! Articles the plans are, to say the least, Orwellian in concept.

They have revealed that they are planning to acquire a mass of personal information about each and every one of its regular users!

Now we should all care about personal liberties and privacy, and what Google promises is a truly terrifying prospect.

We all know that Web 2.0 is flawed and that a great deal of Web content is not at all what it seems. What passes for 'Amateur' contribution is often, in fact, professional advertising or political or other propaganda.

"So what" might be your response, "does it really matter"?

Well we have cunningly planted advertising masquerading as music videos, now that should start you worrying because from there come real problems!

But the real worrying thing is the intrusiveness of Web 2.0 Remember every time you make a search on Google or Yahoo they clock your area of interest. Surreptitiously! And then build up a profile of you – and the more information they have about us they can sell for a nice profit to advertisers and marketers.

Maybe, just maybe, the Internet will, finally, lead to the collapse of the entire edifice of global commerce, at the very moment it is boasting about the biggest media mergers, the biggest advertising budgets.

As I have said in the past, the Internet was not created for advertising – on the Internet people find what they want not as much through advertising as through far more credible word-of-mouth.

The Internet is a market for ideas – real ideas that interest people, not the fantasies of Advertising and Marketing people.

But the real point that Corporations have missed is that the Internet and its citizens would rather be looking at the latest LOL "swimming cat" phenomena that a ten million pound advertising campaign.

And still they keep shooting for those mass markets on the Web!

I repeat, it is absolutely pointless spraying a pile of excrement with gold paint or by getting consultants and spin-doctors to dance around it waving dodgy statistics. We have to change the very fundamentals of advertising…we have to start again from the very beginning…As they say "in the beginning was the word", we have then to rediscover the true meaning of the word "communication". Because once we do that all our hideous problems will be solved, and Clients can save a bundle of money.

So why don't we start…right now?

And so we start with true communication…interactive communication to be precise. Interactive communication dramatically alters the way the viewers perceive your commercials and advertising messages, in whatever form, instead of being seen as an interruption your messages now become a meaningful source of information (a form of programming) and thus are watched in a totally different way.

Presenting your advertising within this format allows the most dramatic evolution of advertising itself. This renaissance in this period of the ongoing history of advertising will be know as advertising by true, accurate, more predictable, instant and measurable results.

Clients will pay only by results. The interactive nature of the new technology will allow Interactive TV to measure the results and present these results as a post-evaluation of their participation. Clients will then pay for participation based upon these evaluations.

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