I know we all like to think that people love to see our ads, but there are people out there looking to build tools that allow people to block or skip the beautiful advertising we create. I know… it’s hard to believe that anyone wouldn’t want to see that “HeadOn – Apply Directly To The Forehead” commercial every ten minutes, but there are people out there who desire to consume ad-free uncluttered media.
Browsers, like Firefox, have add-ons, like Ad Blocker Plus, that allow people to block out all online advertising and replace it with images of their choice. Another ad-killing Firefox add-on is Readability, which allows people to remove all the clutter from a webpage and only display the main body copy in a single, easy to read and print column of text.
DVRs, like TiVo, are another great example of people trying to avoid watching advertising.
And Augmented Reality is also trying to get into the game. People at Fast Company and MIT have written about future heads up displays that will allow real world advertising to be blocked out or replaced all together. For example, imagine 2015, you are wearing augmented reality glasses, walking down the street and all billboards, posters and logos in your view will be able to be replaced with photos or web applications of your choosing, in real time.
I’m not here to say that this is a bad trend or a good one. Obviously most of the great content online and in the real world is ad supported and most of us take it for granted. But we will still need a way to spread the word about new products and services. What does this trend mean for the advertising industry?
A big goal JWT for the past 5 or so years is to create ideas that people will want to spend time with. This couldn’t be more true today with technology giving people increasing control over the advertising they see. To counter this, advertisers also have a host of new techniques to break through. Product placement and sponsorships are an obvious answer, but to really make an impact in this new paradigm, advertisers need to create ambient ideas OOH, engage in social media, produce longer form content and build online & mobile experiences that people find useful or entertaining.
In the comments, let us know how you think advertisers can engage in this new environment.
I’ve had an unfortunate series of events happen to my digital life over the past few months, but have learned a couple very valuable lessons from it. The unfortunate series of events began with a 500 GB hard drive failure on my home desktop PC. It had my entire life on it from 1996 to present day. All my pictures, movies, music, contacts, calendar entries, bookmarks, etc… you get the picture. Luckily I kept an external 500 GB backup drive, which I had updated a couple months before the crash. I bought a new (1 TB) hard drive for the computer and was able to recover most of my important files, not including anything new since the last backup.
IM, Chat, Email and Social Networks Gone Wild
December 8th, 2009 by Rory Partalis
Categories: Digital Innovations | Tags: all-in-one, api, buddy media, chat, comments, communication, content, dashboard, digsby, email, facebook, fan pages, friendfeed, google, google wave, IM, images, inbox, instant messaging, media landscape, mobile, open, ping.fm, pixelpipe, platforms, profiles, social media, Social Networks, status updates, trillian, twitter, video, websites | 2 Comments »
The Social Media Landscape has become so complex that something needs to be developed to help us manage all of our profiles.
There is a quiet battle brewing under the shiny-new-thing syndrome we all are guilty of from time to time. This battle grew out of the complexity and exploding number of websites the average internet user has profiles on today. Modern advertisers and marketers are especially plagued by the inability to keep up with all the comments, inboxes, and instant messaging clients we use to communicate with our family, friends, coworkers and clients.
This provides an opening for smart companies to build an all-in-one online communication dashboard. And this opening gets bigger and bigger as companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google keep rolling out more and more open platforms and APIs. This allows other websites, widgets and mobile apps to have greater access to content and information from those platforms.
Friendfeed was obviously the original social network aggregator, and Facebook mimicked their methods and then bought them outright. Now Google has ambitions with Google Wave, but there are still gaps for an all-in-one online communication dashboard that both pulls and pushes content from all other communication platforms.
I’ve seen a few emerging spaces where companies are trying to partially realize this dream. The first battlefield is combining IM, Email and Social Network communications and content into one chat client. The two rivals I’ve found in this space are Trillian and Digsby. Each are strong contenders and pull from many of the same sources. I am currently testing Trillian on my work laptop and Digsby on my home laptop. I prefer Digsby’s IM client and chat window layout, but like the look of Trillian’s pop-ups better. In my opinion either works fine for my needs, both are strong contenders in the all-in-one space, but neither are quite there yet.
The second area where I see a battle brewing is the content uploading battlefield. This is where you can login to one place and post text, images, videos and other content to all of your social network profiles. Both Ping.fm and PixelPipe have a lot to offer in this space and also push to many of the same sources. Both also have mobile apps, which is awesome for posting content on the go.
I’ve also seen a third battlefield begin to emerge after having a conference call with a company called Buddy Media. They provide a dashboard that manages the layout of Facebook Fan Pages and Twitter Profiles. Very cool stuff, but still in its infancy.
Have you seen any other similar tools like this that would make all of our online lives easier? If so, please mention them in the comments section below.
2 Comments »