In Part I of my look at advertising, I wrote about my problems with advertising: namely, that it encourages overconsumption, it’s totally unavoidable, and it often creates an artificial need by making viewers feel inadequate.  None of the suggestions I’m about to explore does anything to correct those problems, I’m afraid, but at least they might help scale down the unpleasantness factor.

The first “solution” would be to ban advertising.  I’m not an advocate of this, not only because it seems unfeasible, but also because I think there is a time and place for advertising, and it does fill a valid need.  But while it sounds extreme, it turns out that it’s not unheard of.  As my friend Jessica Tipping pointed out in response to my previous post, the city of São Paolo actually did just that.  You only have to think about it a moment to realise how much peace of mind a total ban on advertising would restore.

But even tearing down billboards can’t stop the flow of advertising entirely — the Internet and television, newspapers and magazines are our primary sources of entertainment and information, and all are chock-full of advertising. And unlike billboards and flyers, those media rely on the revenue advertising generates in order to exist: take away their advertising, and you take away a good chunk of our media with it.  So scrapping all advertising is not only (likely) impossible, it’s also unadvisable.

There is, however, a tendency to minimise the reach of ads even in media like those mentioned above.  PVRs make it possible to skip over commercial breaks.  Any type of video that can be found on the Internet with ads can also be found elsewhere without it.  Advertisers are in a constant struggle with new technologies that are designed to allow users to remove or skip ads.  The result is that ads become more insidious: they’re either data locked, or embedded.

I use the expression “data lock” loosely, not in the narrow computer science sense, but in an end-user sense: you can’t get at what you want without doing something first.  Hulu is a great example of this: they put commercial breaks into the programming they stream, with no way to fast forward — and if you close the video window to check your Email during the commercials, they’ll pause until you come back and watch them.  There’s dozens of ways this can be applied to Internet content, including forcing someone to interact with an ad before they can access content, so that the ad cannot be ignored.

There’s also the use of product placement — an old trick that’s being given new life online.  In an article on Ars earlier this week, Jacqui Cheng describes a new deal between TiVo, that great underminer of TV advertising, and Amazon: the “ultimate form of product placement” will become a reality, and users will be able to purchase items shown onscreen directly through Amazon.  The show, in essence, becomes the commercial.

Is this good or bad?  Well, not having to wait for commercial breaks is good (if they are, in fact, eliminated, which is anything but certain).  But will product placement embedded in programming undermine the integrity of the art?  The answer would be yes, if television programming had any integrity left.  Fortunately, TV sold out long ago, obliquely trading its integrity for revenue when the programming itself became nothing more than a way of delivering advertising to the largest possible audience.  I can’t imagine viewers under the new system would notice much of a difference.  But because the gap between viewing product placement on TV and making a purchase is eliminated, the increased effectiveness, in theory, counterbalances the indirectness of the delivery.  It will be interesting to see how it pans out.  I have a feeling it will work well for certain goods, like clothes, but not for those products that prey on your insecurity.  How ridiculously white would an actor’s teeth have to be before you’d click on his face to be redirected to the Amazon oral hygeine page?  For that matter, how many times can storylines reasonably revolve around the great service at Maaco or the strong litigatory powers of Friedman, Domiano and Smith?

Data lock is a good way to force people to sit through your ads, but what if they hate the ad?  Embedded product placement is great, but it can only work for a limited variety of ads.  No, the secret to great advertising is to only show people ads they want to see.  There’s two components to this: product, and tone.

The first is obvious: there’s no point advertising a product or service to someone if there’s no chance they’ll ever want to take advantage of it.  Why make a man sit through tampon ads?  Why make a childless spinster sit through diaper ads?  It’s not only a waste of the viewer’s time, it’s a waste of advertising dollars.  If only there was some way to know who was watching the ads, and tailor the products advertised to those individuals’ needs!

Tone is equally important.  Both men and women drink beer, but beer advertising tends to be targeted towards men.  It’s not that beer ads aren’t selling a product to women, but consider the fact that beer ads tend to rely on myths of masculinity to promote their product.  Imagine this ad featuring two women — it just wouldn’t work.  And while women watching might get a chuckle out of it, they’re clearly not the intended audience.  Likewise, people of all ages and sexes enjoy yogurt, but this ad is speaking to a much narrower demographic than the total yogurt-eating market.  All of which is to day that while it’s important to limit advertising to potential buyers, it’s equally important to approach those potential buyers in the right way.  Humour, irony, taste, attraction — these are all subjective things, but advertising that can appeal to them correctly will go a lot further than a one-size-fits-all approach.

The problem of how to correctly target advertising to an appropriate audience, and how to do it in an appropriate way, is not an easy one to solve.  First and foremost, it requires getting a lot of information about the person viewing the content.  There are a few potential strategies — but I’ve gone on long enough; these will have to wait for Part III.