Media Week

Like most blokes I enjoy a good shave in the morning but I was suprised to see poster-sized ads for Gillette Fusion plastered over broadsheet sports supplements this week.

First of all, on a personal level, it annoyed me. I enjoy reading sport and these ads were screaming for attention. But they were just not relevant to my mood or what I was doing.

 Some years ago, I was involved in a blog seeding campaign for Gillette Fusion with Shiny Media (www.shinymedia.com). Disclosure: I'm a shareholder in Shiny Media. I thought the idea behind that campaign was smart: look to participate in conversations with bloggers where relevant. Maybe Gillette fusion is running a blogging outreach programme to support these latest ads.

However the poster-sized ads in the sports sections seemed from a different advertising age to me.

www.itsopen.co.uk

There's been a lot of talk about whether or not Twitter should take advertising lately.

But you can advertise on Twitter. Check out betweeted.com or www.monitter.com. These are popular, some would say, iconic, Twitter applications that take ads. Here's another: featuredusers.com.

I reckon these mark the start of a new type of advertising. It's niche and relevant. It's not mass. It's about a mass of niches.

Any views?

www.itsopen.co.uk

Digg is launching, if you have not already heard, a user- driven ads system. This is how it works: if the readers of the site love your ad: you pay less; if they hate it, you pay more. Imagine if that was applied across the board to advertising!! Advertising now has to created in collaboration with the customer or it has to be bang on the money and be really relevant otherwise it is going nowhere.

 Read more here:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/03/told-you-digg-for-ads-coming

So what's the future for advertising: my opinion, for what it is worth, is that it will be niche, niche, niche and more niche. Mass advertising is dying on its feet. Who watches TV ads when you can skip them? Who bothers with one- size- fits all  ads in print to ink newspapers which are not sustainable in the long term?

 Any comments?

Jeff Jarvis has come up with an interesting idea about advertising. He argues that ideally there should be no need to advertise as people should love the product so much they rave about it to their peers and thus promote sales. Advertising, he suggests, points out that the direct relationship has broken down somehow.

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/05/30/advertising-as-failure/

I think there is an element of truth in what Jarvis is saying particularly in an online context. Some companies seem to have already given up on entering into conversations with their customers online. They just allow complaints to carry on without saying anything. They feel they cannot change anything. Why are they so pessimistic? So instead they resort to ads to try to blast the message out that everything is alright really but if it is in effect just brash make- up on a pig then it ain't going to work. And people will continue to trash the company's reputation online. Motto of the story is listen to what your customers are saying online, involve them in your products, take their criticisms on board, collaborate with them and then you are more likely to be successful. Your customers will do the advertising for you by word of mouth.

www.itsopen.co.uk