Online Ads Piss You Off. Except When They Don’t.
April 1st, 2008 | by Brad King |Jacqui Cheng, who I tried to stalk in Chicago and SXSW along with the rest of Ars Technica staff, has written a piece about changing attitudes with online advertising.
The premise: people are aware that they are being tracked, they get annoyed when that tracking leads to poorly targeted advertising and they don’t mind it so much when they get ads for companies that they have some interest.
This isn’t an opinion piece, either. She’s based it upon a research study by TNS Global.
The results are stunning.
In a very short amount of time, we’ve willingly accepted the idea that what happens online does not stay online.
Obviously there are upsides and downsides. We’ve entered the early days of the panopticon, although it’s unclear who is watching the watchers. But to fully gain the functionality of a metaverse, an always-connected social sphere of bits streaming by us, we must all willingly participate in the free-flow of our information.
Clearly we keep some information secure. You shouldn’t have by bank account information or my medical history; however, I’m under no grand illusion that if someone REALLY wanted that information, they couldn’t track it down quite easily.
I’m also relatively sure that if they did, someone else could track them down relatively easily.
That’s the nature of the world we live in.
For journalists, that means two things: it’s time to tap into that collective vault of bits and use that to track down stories and it’s time to open up your information to the data stream.
Let go of the information control. Content is king, but it’s not where the money is. The money is with contextual information and crowds.
