JG etc.

Noah wrote a post on Gawker artists.

Got me thinking…..
If you believe that online advertising should be media, than it is on the marketers and publishers to make sure that the advertising reflects it.

The way the web is going with the larger online media companies(Google, MSFT, AOL) shifting away from premium inventory in favor of scale and reach while also sharecropping the long tail. Most publishers are being forced to follow this evolution, which, in turn, causes publishers to be embarrassed of their advertising messages and leaves their community less interested in seeing ads.

Why is this bad? Check out the problems that MSN is having with Digg*, or the problems that Google is having with social networks. People are tired of being tricked into clicking or being annoyed with messages that don’t compliment the conversation.

In search advertising, media are those sponsored text links you see and they work awesome, but what Google is learning is that those ads don’t translate to the rest of the web. They are still better than option #2 for most publishers at this time, that being the bottom feeding lead-gen ads(Classmates, Mortgage, Free iPod, Univ. of Phoenix, Car Insurance, etc) that still dominate the web……. How far are we away from finding out that the only way to differentiate with these messages is to engage and allow others to engage in an experience. How do we get there. Brands need to build platforms for people to engage with and develop communities around. Give them a full media experience and allow the marketing to become what starts the conversation.

How do we get engage communities to these platforms. Create a collection of premium sites that only accept premium inventory. When there aren’t premium ads, run house ads with conversational messages, “art” from the community is a great example. Get people used to looking at ad space as a conversational form of media, not as a place to ignore messages.

Pasting javascript ad code and aggregating eyeballs is a shoddy long term plan. The new publishing and advertising model online needs to do more.
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*Some diggers get mad at almost anything and to MSN’s credit they have done a much better job in the last month with keeping the free iPod ads off the site.