‘A Personally Branded Recommendation Channel’
By hand-picking ads only for products and services that you’ve actually used and liked, it stops being an ad feed and starts being a personally branded recommendations channel. It’s closer to an affiliate relationship with the advertiser – like the millions of people that mention a book in a blog post and then link to amazon with their affiliate ID.
Ultimately, the only value in advertising (from the consumer’s perspective, so we’ll ignore brand reinforcement) is product discovery. But ad targeting sucks (push model) compared to recommendations from humans with whom you have a proven track record of common taste and interest (pull model – I choose to read waxy.org). When a friend recommends a new product to me, it doesn’t feel like an ad, it feels like news.
If every online “publisher” (ezines, blogs, etc) were to adopt the same “only products I’ve used and liked” model, advertising would start to become a valuable part of the publication – enough so that it would be to our benefit to NOT run AdBlock. Afterall, you don’t run PostBlock, because you believe you’ll be interested in what that author has to say.
Here’s my point in a nutshell. I friggin hate advertising, but capitalists defend it with “how else can companies inform consumers about new products?” This is the practical alternative, and I’m all for it.
This is the most brilliant thing I’ve read about advertising. Ever.
