Stop Saying Ads Must Get Better

Fighting Dirty

In one of the best moments of "Inside Amy Schumer" this past season, there's a skit where a self-defense class is taught, but instead of physical combat, it's emotional combat as part of a male-female romantic relationship. In the middle of many solid laugh lines, a male student tries to get a word in edgewise, and is told that he can never raise his voice... with the joke being that, well, he hadn't raised his voice.

But there it is, the perfect way to escalate an argument into nuclear warfare: tell someone they are doing something when they aren't. (Oh, and if you want a bonus one on this, feel free to accuse someone of always thinking they are right. Well, um, does anyone really argue for things that they think are wrong, without being, well, psychopaths? But I digress.)

We now turn to the reason you read these little musings: the point in re marketing and advertising.

The purveyors of ad blocking software, in a remarkable bit of conflation, seem to believe that blocking ads will (magically?) make advertising better. The argument is that native is great (um, sure, if you've got great content producers who don't mind working in the gray area), and the current ad situation, especially vis a vis mobile, is so bad that you are going to have to burn the village down to save it.

There's some merits to these arguments. No one can, with good conscience, argue that the mobile Web and advertising experience is what it should be. Defending the status quo is borderline impossible, especially when you consider how viewing ads has recently put people at risk from malvertising, let alone data plan costs. Like file sharing before it, the existence of the technology seems to argue for the use of the technology.

But, well, lots of technologies exist that you just can't use any way that you like. Plenty of markets are nearly as messed up as online advertising, not the least of which is healthcare. But pointing a gun at a doctor and demanding service, or bringing a bazooka into your local pharmacy to debate per pill costs, is not going to work. That would just be obvious theft, and result in either incarceration or societal chaos... and asking doctors or pharmacists to fix the healthcare market, since they now have this new stress to make it better, would be insanity. Online advertising will get better when it is properly priced, and when we stop making it dance on the heads of pins (I'm talking about clicks here) that other ad channels don't have to do.

Also, well, how exactly should ads get better? No one wants to give up more of their information to make them better targeted. No one wants to give them more time and space to tell a story. And truth be told, the vast majority of ads aren't supposed to be Great; they are supposed to make you more likely to buy something. Great ads are mostly great for the people who make them, not the companies that run them.

Finally, this. I've worked on more ads than, likely, anyone you have ever met. (Thousands of clients, 15 years in online. It's been fun.) The number of ads that were not the best we could do, given the size of the contract and the need to make a deadline? Damned near none, really. It's what professionals do; you work to the best of your ability, even if the client has challenges (maybe especially if they have challenges). We didn't shortchange anyone. We made the best ads we could. So does, well, just about every ad pro in the business.

So stop saying ads have got to get better, because they are already just about as good as they can be. What needs to improve is the technology and bandwidth around the online experience, the pricing for viewable impressions for branding value, and the understanding from consumers that without some form of value exchange, most professional and quality amateur content will have to go behind pay firewalls, and the Web as we knew it, where traffic meritocracies could spring up based around a roughly fair system of monetization, will end.

With the same quality of ads as any other medium has.

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