The Changing Nature Of Advertising

John C. Dvorak writes, Advertisements in special-interest publications generally have a better impact due to it s targeted nature of medium. Google has taken this targeting one step further by aiming ads at people who literally state an interest with a search term. While the mechanism isn't rocket science, - the amazing thing about it is that it took so long to develop properly. The earliest attempts at such advertising were offensive fake search results, if you can recall a few of those concepts that came and went. It's becoming more and more apparent that mass-market advertising is so sickeningly ubiquitous that it's become an offense to many. Half-hour TV shows have only 20 minutes of content, with the rest commercials and promotions. People flock to HBO to get away from this problem. The biggest feature of TiVo and DVRs is the ability to kill commercials. MythTV has a plug-in that when you are recording a show takes the commercials out of the base recording automatically. Radio is worse. Radio today is almost impossible to listen to because of the long commercial breaks. No wonder people are listening to podcasts more and more. While the ITV folks will go on about all its other interesting features, it's really about the shopping when you boil it down. The problem is that unless you are on a shopping channel, you are rarely shopping when you are watching TV. So the effectiveness of targeted ads on TV has to stink when compared with a special-interest magazine or the Internet. While the first ITV trials were done in the 1960s and this is as far as it's gotten. Google has actually made ads workable and nonintrusive overnight, while the advertising industry has just made their products more and more annoying and he predicts a bleak future for the industry. John C. Dvorak may evoke extreme reactions in certain segments of the industry -but clearly he has new ideas to discuss almost week after week - these pieces are also generally well researched.