The advertising supported model is fantastic. There was a period of time when it looked like everyone wanted their business to be ad-supported. It's a good idea because consumers don't feel like they are paying for your product, so they may use it a lot. But, in reality, consumers are paying with attention. It's a very small micropayment, but it is real.
The fact that it is so valuable to introduce people to a product which they might not have heard about is wonderful. But, when you think about it, if you buy Charmin toilet paper, you're paying for the ads they run on television. If they pay to advertise during The View, and you don't watch The View, you are subsidizing someone else's TV show.
That's why I love car manufacturers. I don't have a car. I don't need a car. I don't plan to buy a car. But, I love sports. I spent every Sunday this season watching the NFL. Car manufacturers subsidize the hell out of that. It's great to know that something so expensive, like the rights to broadcast the NFL, is not paid by me. It's paid by all of the people who need pick up trucks (Aside: Why do marketers think that everyone who watches football needs a pickup truck? Probably because Ford and GM thought everyone in America were in construction).
But, the ad-supported model is coming under stress now. I think it's rather funny. We were headed towards a place where everything in the country would be free except for toilet paper. But, toilet paper would cost $80,000 a year. Now that the ad markets have collapsed, people are re-evaluating. It was a crazy phenomenom, because most of the ad-supported tech companies targeted early adopter-types who, for some reason, have a moral aversion to ads. They don't see paying attention to an ad in this week's episode of Heroes as the micropayment for the production of that show. They see ads as annoying (despite the fact that they give us cliffhangers which actually increase the enjoyment many programs).
Well, I want to suggest that we stop this madness. As consumers, we should be much more direct about what we like and don't like. We should all start paying for our content. We do it with the movies. Why can't we do it with shorter form content at home? There should be more options for consuming content.
For example, I want an episode of 30 Rock. I can see a lot of ways to support that:
- Pay for it without ads (HBO)
- Pay less for it with some ads (Cable)
- Pay nothing for it with more ads (Networks)
- Pay nothing for it with a lot of ads contingent on passing a quiz at the end that proves you watched the ads and learned the marketing message(s)
That last option is potentially revolutionary. Imagine the CPMs you could charge if people had literally promised to learn your marketing message. Even if you haven't found the right person for your product (for Charmin, that would be an ass-less guy), you have guaranteed that he knows your value proposition. It's possible that he has friends with asses and one day they'll talk about TP, and he'll share his knowledge. It potentially could take the wind out of the sales (punny?) of ad-targeting. I mean, who really cares if you played the right ad to the right person if they didn't internalize the message? Hard to believe that would result in increased sales.
But, the bottom line is that it would be great for us as consumers to get past the hurdle of paying for the show we want directly and thereby direct our resources to the content that we like, not the content that advertisers think we like. We need to become the patrons to the arts that existed in a bygone era.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=0c8f7f9c-dfa5-4201-b13a-475b0de36618)
