BETTER ADVERTISING VIA BARTERED SPONSORSHIP Copyright 1994 Toby Braun Chicago, Illinois utobia@mcs.com A capitalistic society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production of images. We consume images at an ever faster rate and, as Balzac suspected cameras used up layers of the body, images consume reality. -- Susan Sontag It's been said before and I'll say it again: Advertising is annoying (and perhaps in Sontag's terms--dangerous). It's really no one's fault, I believe the problem is largely structural, but too many advertising messages are perceived by the public as garish, stupid, petty and intrusive. Now that I've finished making friends with the rest of my industry, let's stop to take a look at why advertising can be so annoying. I think there are two main reasons: 1) Advertising messages are noisy because they usually contain too much irrelevant information. 2) Advertising delivery is noisy because delivery mediums are designed to make advertising as intrusive as possible. However, we now stand on the threshold of a new media delivery system, one that is capable of radically altering the way advertising messages are delivered. I have previously argued for a system of bartered sponsorship, where consumers trade electronically compiled personal information to advertisers who are willing to sponsor a user's access to some forms of online content. [The essay that establishes this model, titled, "A Model for an Advertiser Sponsored Infobahn" is available via anonymous ftp at ftp.mcs.com, directory /mcsnet.users/utobia/. I will gladly forward copies by e-mail if you don't have Internet ftp access.] For example, if you wanted to access a pay-per-view movie, you'd be given the choice of trading demographic information with an advertiser in exchange for their sponsorship of that program. The same would hold true for most kinds of premium access content. I also support basic public access and systems that offer standard service packages as well as premium services that are only available on a pay-per-access basis (expanding on the model used by most cable systems and the online service CompuServe). I believe this model is important because it affords the following user-centric options: 1) Users decide if premium content is to be sponsored by data sharing or if they will simply pay for their selection. Users also get the choice of choosing a sponsor from a roster and get to decide when they will view the advertising message; immediately, interspersed within the content or at a later time. 2) Users maintain their own databases within their own "media box," maximizing both the accuracy and privacy of their database. The higher integrity of the data will help ensure that the value of the data remains high (meaning access to content can remain relatively inexpensive). Users can, if they wish, decide not to make personal data available and could request sponsorship anonymously (which would be bartered at a lower rate because it is less valuable to sponsors). 3) Sponsoring corporations can be freed from keeping their own expensive and often inaccurate databases. This will have the secondary effect of helping to reduce the public perception of Big Business acting as Big Brother. 4) The infobahn (or Information Infrastructure or whatever you want to call it) is itself often seen as a move towards a more impersonal, more Orwellian future. I believe that returning the control of personal information to the person will help create a new media delivery system that will serve human interests rather than subvert them. I also believe that the forms of advertising we are currently familiar with, particularly print ads and television spots, will evolve into more interactive, more personalized, forms of expression. I have also written an essay on this topic, called "Forms of Advertising under Convergent Media." [This file is also publicly available at the same site mentioned above.] Within the context of both essays I have also asserted that we will need some sort of programmed agent technology to help us manage the overwhelming range of information a global internetwork can provide. A few have written to me, arguing that some of the technologies I suggest in my proposals won't be available for many years to come, perhaps decades. My response has generally been that it would be foolish to plan based merely on what we can build today. I think we must plan based on whatever we can envision as an ultimate system so that we don't waste our efforts by building a system that will be outmoded by the time it's finished. It may take 25 years or more to build a really efficient programmed agent or to lay enough fiber to make a system like this work, but when you're planning to build a beast that will have a global impact for many generations to come, 25 years seems right around the corner. I began this rant by stating that I agree with people who think advertising can be annoying. I said that I thought one reason was that current advertising messages contain lots of irrelevant information. Let's think about what that means for a moment. What's relevant in an advertisement can be difficult to determine. If you want to be very strict, you could define it as anything that doesn't directly support the product or service's positioning statement (i.e., buy Brand X because _____.) In this case a hardliner might say that TV spots don't really need music or decorative backgrounds or highly paid spokespeople or dozens of other artifacts which indirectly support the intended communication. So what would be left? A product shot and an announcer's voice reading what amounts to a bland headline? I don't really think anyone would argue in favor of this extreme form of execution. Advertising often feels the obligation to entertain as well as inform. There is a real need to "hook" the viewer into watching a commercial message. If users aren't hooked, they'll turn the channel and miss the sponsor's message. Therefore, there are two tasks that need to be accomplished in a commercial; first entice the viewer by offering something that the viewer wants to see--usually entertainment--then inform the consumer of the product's intended message. This is not a new observation. In fact, it is quite literally "Advertising 101," one of the most basic rules in the industry. Why does this have to be so? I said it just a moment ago; "If users aren't hooked, they'll turn the channel and miss the sponsor's message." But what if this could be changed? Think about it, viewers don't really want to watch commercials. It's advertisers and the clients they represent that want the public to watch ads. Why? Because they (actually you and me too) need to sell the goods and services they provide or they'll go out of business (and we'll all be unemployed!) And how can goods or services be sold if no one knows about them? The point is that our system is currently structured on the needs and wants of business and hardly focused on the needs and wants of our society except in those few ways that benefit commerce. Ads are entertaining so that they can hold you long enough to make a sale. We do this because we know you can turn away at a moment's notice if you're bored or uninterested. If ads were linked to content using a different structure, such as the bartered sponsorship system outlined above, we could create a very different relationship between the ad and sponsored content. Ads under this system wouldn't have to work so hard to gain the viewer's attention since the viewer actually requested a sponsor for their access to content. Because personal preferences can be bartered for "content credits," advertisers can create less noisy, more relevant messages because they know they are reaching prequalified viewers who've expressed an interest in either their category or their particular offering. Consider how simplistic most advertising messages are. They're that way because they're communicated to a broad audience when they're actually intended for a much narrower audience--potential customers--people who usually know at least a little about whatever category is involved. Since the message is being sent to the masses, it must be understandable by the masses. Advertising copy is constantly being run through an "idiot filter" that keeps many ads from ever saying anything of substance. An opportunity to speak to a targeted audience means that ad copy can communicate more of what's important and less of what's not. I'm not actually saying that advertising will stop trying to be entertaining, certainly no one wants boring advertising of the style I alluded to above. But I do think ads will be freed from much of the clumsiness and extraneous baggage they suffer from today. If users have the means to request particular sponsors or even specific ads, they will act as the ultimate "focus group," communicating their desires with a level of accuracy that was never possible before. This will provide constant feedback which will help further increase the relevance and decrease the noisiness of advertising messages. The current structure of advertising forms and delivery systems do much to deny the kind of quality advertising that we should strive for. The structure requires messages that are noisy due to irrelevance. The structure forces a shouting match between sponsors who must compete for your constant attention. The structure forces messages that lack substance because they must appeal to the masses rather than a predisposed audience. The new structure we create in our Information Infrastructure policies must be more flexible and more user-centric than the media systems we currently endure. I call on the readers of this article to critically examine the issues I've raised and to respond through public debate. We cannot afford to let these issues be decided for us by politicians and corporate managers alone. If we want a more user-centric media delivery system I suggest that we'll need a more user-centric debate--and this requires user involvement from the very beginning.