inqk.net

Mandy Brown has a great post that concisely describes the dilemma of advertising and reading on the web. The disruption of the reading experience by advertising is an issue I feel incredibly strongly about and one that has prompted me to adopt a variety of strategies, from avoiding particular web sites altogether to using tools like AdBlock¹. In an extreme case, it’s what’s got me wasting away weekends building a web app of my own to make a certain kind of reading pleasurable again².

All of this got me thinking about the intersection of advertising and online content. I’ve been meaning to write something about this for some time now and Brown’s final question seemed like the perfect point to jump off from:

Wasn’t the web supposed to be better than this? Wasn’t there a promise that we could generate money and meaning, not merely the former? I’m still looking; but when I find it I will part with every penny I have.

I do believe that for some sites the answer has been found. It’s called the Deck. The Deck is an excellent example of an advertising platform that makes sense on the web. It succeeds in spite of (or perhaps because of?) its unobtrusiveness. I’ve found over a repeated period of time that I click on more ads it runs than on any other competing advertising platform, including Google’s.

For those not familiar with the Deck, a quick introduction. The Deck is an advertising network run by the design firm Coudal Partners. At the time of writing, it consists of a network of 33 selected web sites and services whose audience is primarily creative, web and design professionals (or those with pretensions to be so). Every one of those 33 sites and services shows only one advertisement per page and each advertisement consists of a 120 px x 90 px image with 180 characters of accompanying text. That’s it. The sites that are part of the Deck agree not to run any other advertisements so that Deck ad is the only ad on their page. At the time of writing, a month of advertising across the Deck will set you back a cool US$6900.

There are two reasons I believe the Deck works. The first is that they’ve found the balance between advertising and content. As Brown notes in her piece, as advertising becomes more disruptive we become better at tuning it out (either by avoiding the content that the ads are attached to or by selectively blocking out the ads using technological tools). But the Deck showcases an alternative way to get our attention: don’t be noisy, be exclusive.

The second reason the Deck works is that it’s targeted. Now when people think about targeted advertising they usually think about the kind of algorithmic targeting that has made Google a squillion dollars. But there is a different kind of targeting that for want of a better term I’ll call targeting by intelligent design. Targeting by intelligent design may be even more successful than algorithmic targeting.

Targeting by intelligent design has two aspects. The first is to have a sufficiently narrow audience. The audience of people that view the ads on the Deck are likely to be creative, web or design professionals because the sites that form the Deck are aimed specifically at that small segment. They’re almost all blogs run by a single blogger and almost all have a small range of stories they’ll cover³.

The second element of targeting by intelligent design has to do with the advertisers themselves. Advertisements on the Deck are only accepted if the Deck’s owners have either used or paid for that service or product. While at first glance this might seem counterproductive I would contend (and my experience demonstrates) it produces better, more relevant ads that are more likely to appeal to the target audience. Moreover, it elevates the ads from shill to endorsement since there is implicit in their placement the knowledge that these ads, and these ads alone, have met the standard necessary to be displayed.

Targeting by intelligent design is by no means an idea exclusive to the Deck. The web comic Penny Arcade successfuly employs a variation of the same strategy. The Penny Arcade web site features only two advertisements on their news pages and one ad on their comic pages. Although the ads typically feature animation and video they are tastefully located and tightly integrated into the overall design of the page. Penny Arcade has similar rules to the Deck and only carries advertisements for products or services they’ve used or paid for.

Intelligent design won’t work for everyone of course. The New York Times is read by too many different people to be able to employ exactly the same tactics as the Deck or Penny Arcade but perhaps a combination of the two is possible.

Consider the case of the news magazine Slate. Slate is an online-only magazine very much in the mould (when it comes to the range of content) of news magazines like Time and Newsweek. Its main focus is on US politics but it runs feature stories on science, health, economics and the environment as well as lighter fare on topics ranging from the latest movies to what to do in the event that you’ve slept with your wife’s sister.

Unfortunately for Slate, it employs the worst examples of algorithmic and intelligent design targeting. The main banner ads are certainly selected based on a rough idea of the type of people that constitute the audience but it is a very rough idea. While the target audience for Slate is no doubt narrowish it’s still a fair bit wider than that of Penny Arcade. Two ads that I’ve seen feature prominently in recent months have been for Hyundai cars and for a National Geographic special. Now I have no interest in Hyundai cars. I am neither in the market for a car nor am I sure I could even buy a Hyundai in Japan if I even wanted to. I’m also not particularly interested in National Geographic specials. Both these ad campaigns were completely wasted on me. They’re classy ads, to be sure, and they most assuredly cost a lot of money to make. The problem is I’m never going to click on them.

The algorithmic advertising is even worse. When I visit at the moment I’m bombared with offers to murder my wrinkles, whiten my teeth and gain certification in Six Sigma. I have no interest in clicking on any of these⁴. They distract from the intelligent design advertisements, make the site look cheap and, from a reading point of view, add a degree of clutter that makes it annoying to read the content I actually came to the site to view.

Now why can’t Slate combine the two and feature fewer ads but make them better targeted? The fact of the matter is no matter how wonderful an ad, I’m likely to only click on one advertisement per page (if only because once I’ve clicked on it I’m going to be taken away from the page). Before we had the sophisticated kind of algorithms we now do this might have justified showing a bunch of ads and hoping the law of averages meant I’d click on one of them. But we’re in 2009 now. Surely we can do better and select only one ad, but make it be one I’m almost certain to want to click.

Maybe it’s all too complicated once you get past a certain size. Perhaps large content-producing monoliths like newspapers and magazines are doomed to go the way of the Dodo and this is what Brown was getting at when she lamented the web’s seeming inability to combine making money with making meaning. That may be the case and if it comes to pass I’ll be disappointed for sure. But hey, you big guys had a good run for a while. Maybe it’s the turn of the small fry now.