Gustav von Sydow on digital advertising, online media and tech start-ups

Mashable has a quick poll on which social network provides the “best” ads, and naturally you get the “I hate ads, I never watch them…” etc. arguments in the comments. From the people who probably think that selling Coke using AdWords is a swell idea and the most appropriate way to market a drug that took 6 billion dollars and 12 years to develop would be using Twitter and YouTube virals.

Truth is, no one wants “to be sold”. We don’t like the feeling that we’re getting manipulated and that our tastes and behaviors fit in to some sneaky strategic planner’s description of a target audience. Because we think more of ourselves.

We quote stuff like “banner blindness”, “increased clutter” and “marketing savvy consumers” to imply that we as recipients are getting smarter. However, so are advertisers. Well, maybe not all of them … but all over the world advertising is alive and doing very well thank you.

People are still responding to advertising in the way we want to, meaning that being exposed to an advertiser’s message increases the likelihood of someone taking a preferred action further down the road. And you’re not different. Deal with it.

As for the social networks and their appaling low CPMs, which is certainly a testament to the fact that despite the humongous pile of data available to their dataminers, good ol’ content is still the most reliable source for relevance.

Not that this won’t change though. I’m pretty sure that reactive ads like that of my pet project Burt will completely change the advertising economics in these networks, and some clever chap in a research lab is probably working on some way to use conversation (instead of content) as context for advertising. Dialogue based, contextual advertising, perhaps? “Conversational advertising”?

The social networking sphere is still waiting for it’s Overture. But it’s out there, and my guess is that paying $1CPM to advertise in a data rich, high involvement environments like Facebook or MySpace will be long gone in two years time.