Doc Searls writes: “Companies like Google and Overture are blowing away everything the old advertising business holds dear. Beautiful images. Attention-grabbing graphics. Awards. Strategy. Even old conventions like branding–a term Procter & Gamble borrowed from the cattle industry, back when they created mass media advertising in the dawn of commercial radio more than 70 years ago. They’re blowing it away by connecting users and advertisers and helping both offer something valuable to each other.”
He gives an example of what Google is doing:
Last month Google added Content Targeting, which puts text ads in banner spaces, replacing graphical annoyances with text-based relevancies. One good thing about this model is it gives sites a monetization model where there was none before. Richard Holden of Google explains, “A lot of independent content on the Web kind of died simply because there wasn’t a monetization model behind it. We’re able to help people to monetize, from a publishing model, content that wasn’t monetizable before.”
Content Targeting is what produces text ads in the banners of BlogSpot sites. I have one friend, who recently decided not to upgrade to the ad-free Pro version of Blogger (which Google owns, by the way), because she liked the advertising in her banner. That means Google has achieved, at least in her case, something of a holy grail: advertising people actually want rather than endure.
