Bob Liodice of the Association of National Advertisers has blogged on the death of TV by advertising in a post titled "Who’s Killing Television?" It’s a thought that has weighing on my mind for ages now, but not just about TV. Advertising is everywhere, spam is everywhere, telemarketing calls reach you everywhere – everything is a pitch, and increasingly consumers are, I think, feeling themselves to be under siege (and good grief – ads in space???). And now, some are agitating for more of the same in the blogosphere – hoping for RSS to develop as a medium for ad delivery.
But it seems to me that we are at the limit of the "lemmification" of the consumer – we’ve had pretty much enough of having our every waking moment treated as a monetization or targeting opportunity. And the tide is starting to turn.
Tivo has woken us up to the pleasure of zapping commercials.
Do-not-call lists are law or will be soon.
Can Spam, while arguably a failure, has whetted our appetite for zapping spam. Spam keeps building (my ISP now says over 95% of its messages are spam), and we will keep trying harder, but some people are now saying that spam has effectively killed email.
ChoicePoint et al have shown us that we cannot trust the database aggregators (who, after all, exist only because they offer their clients new ways of reaching us) to take due care, and a new round of attention on privacy and security laws may well result.
Perhaps advertising is as inevitable as death and taxes – perhaps all of this pushback will fade, and we will return to being passively pitched and fleeced. But I hope not – at its heart, I think the true power of the ‘net is empowerment of the ‘pull’ – it puts the world at our fingertips and allows us to reach out and take from it whatever we will. Will this be enough to empower us to resist the push?
I think the right message may be – unless the advertising itself is killer content, it will inevitably kill its content, and perhaps also its medium as well …