Impossible Solutions to Fix Advertising
We all know the advertising industry has issues. The most important issue is the most obvious one: people dislike ads.
Think about it. We’re literally forcing people to consume the products (ads) they hate. Every single day. Not once, many times. Think about the food you dislike, and imagine you’re forced to eat it many times a day. How traumatic is that?
And it’s not the only issue. There are many other issues like privacy concerns, regulations, ad-blockers, ad-fraud and so on.
In our company we rarely provide consultancy services — not our core business, but each time we do and we talk to our clients they ask us about our thoughts about fixing these macro-issues. Everyone looks for an answer.
Let me now propose some potential solutions to fix our industry. I call them “the impossible solutions”, because I think they’re impossible to achieve. I’ll explain why.
- Limit the amount of ads to 2 per page.
I’ll start with an easy-to-guess one. Limit ads on pages.
All those pop-up banners jumping between us and the content we try to read, those mobile ads blocking the content on a small screen, those more-ads-than-articles news sites, they’ve made people hate ads.
Let’s just stop this madness. Let’s just use 2 decent ads per page, and please don’t make them jump around, pop-up from the corners etc. This will make website pages much cleaner, improve user experience rapidly, and hopefully will change the poor perception of ads. Do this, and we’ll automatically solve some of the top reasons why people use ad-blockers.
But this isn’t likely to happen. Why? Because publishers need more revenues. The more ads on a page, the more money they’ll make. When you have 2 ads on the page, you’ll make less money — not good. Unless there is some form of compensation of lost revenues (higher CPMs & industry-wide acceptance of this limit with no cheating competitors, donations, government subsidies etc.), this is an impossible solution.
2. Educate people about the merits of advertising
Advertising helps companies grow, employ more people and provide better conditions as I explained before. People don’t know this. They don’t even think about it. What do they do instead? They dislike ads. They’re cutting the branch they’re sitting on.
How can we fix this? Simple: educate people about the merits of advertising. Explain to them why it helps to improve their lives. Maybe marketing departments at the companies can organize some training sessions or email company employees to explain this. Maybe governments can think of ways to educate the citizens. Somehow, people should understand that ads are good for them.
But this also is not likely to happen. It requires a lot of resources to educate society about this, and nobody is willing to pay for it. And even if we educate the society somehow, you’ll want your neighbor to click your company’s ads, and you won’t be willing to do the same for his/hers. We’re just selfish creatures. So I believe this is an impossible solution too.
3. Change advertising technology business models to donations
How does an ad-tech company make money? They charge a fixed fee or a commission of the generated revenue / spent budget. Advertisers and publishers pay these technology companies to show ads to people.
So ad-tech companies are incentivized to serve the needs of advertisers / publishers, not people. Is that ad annoying? Do you still see the same ad even if you purchased the product? Is the ad popping up from corners, blocking the content you wanted to read? None of these are important for the ad-tech company.
So I propose a donation-based ad-tech business model, where the “paying customers” are the people who see the ads. They like what they see? They like the way you show ads, in a non-intrusive fashion? Good, let them donate some money to your company for your contribution to their lives.
Sounds silly maybe, but this is the only way to incentivize ad-tech companies to truly respect people. This is the only way to become non-intrusive, non-annoying, and care for the privacies of the users. Regulations? No more needed, gone. Ad-fraud? no more money there, gone.
Is this possible? No, I’m afraid. Donations won’t create companies like Google and Facebook, or smaller companies like The Trade Desk, Criteo, OpenX etc. I’m sure the advertisers and publishers would appreciate some free tech though.
So these are some of the solutions that could help fixing our industry, but they’re impossible to achieve, sorry. I think sooner or later we’ll have to do some unimaginable things to fix this industry, but until then we’ll keep annoying people, and won’t mind their growing anger over us.
