Publisher: Professional Online Publishing: New Media Trends , Communication skills, Online Marketing

In the new bottom-up advertising scenario advertisers release their banners, promoboxes and text links on the Web for final publishers to be picked up at will. These new type of ads would self-contain enough intelligent code to be able to report back to advertisers how well they are performing, how many people are potentially seeing them (page impressions), how many are effectively clicked, and how many lead to an immediate sale. According to Battelle, and this is where I think one needs to question further his assumptions, advertisers would specify which types of sites they would prefer to be placed on, and what audience demographics they want to reach and which kind of sites can carry their ad messages without restrictions. I see this expectation on the part of the advertisers to still dictate control as to who can or cannot carry their messages to be a strong contradiction to how this system would perfectly work. To me this appears as a carried-over-distortion from the old advertiser paradigm. The puritanical issue of walling off sites that may command (according to the advertiser) little credibility is indeed another relic of the wicked advertiser mind of the past. Sites that so generically end up slotted as not credible because they may deal with sex, gambling or other apparently not too noble activities, command notable attention and trust from their visitors, who nonetheless choosing to invest their money in these activities, have like everyone else interests, product preferences, money to spend and eyes to read credible messages. I think these sites are not to be discounted as credibility destroyers. These sites communicate with audiences that are as alive, rich and tangible as the morally sane ones you would like to limit your advertising to. If markets are true conversations we must be able to accept the idea that all markets have a value and there are none to be dismissed. But back to the main topic. Advertisers providing supplemental information about their company, their product, typical customers and whatever else related to it can't be said to be negative in nature by itself. It may actually be useful for some of both the new online advertisers and publishers entering these Web-based markets. At the extreme, this is essentially superfluous information, as messages (your present ads) would find with total efficiency their best channels without need for any external control or direction as this. It is only when the advertiser wants to maintain direct control of the message that you can see the beautiful new paradigm we were just painting fade off into a bastardized dialect of what we already have. If this Bottom-up Advertising is the true paradigm shift required by online markets to synch up with the networked information buzzway that the Web is, we must give in to the fact that the transformation has to be thorough. Yes, what today we still call advertising can become an effective, socially valuable, and efficient mean of exchanging information where no-one exploits no-one else. If it is true that the advertiser rightfully cares only about selling its products/services it should follow that as long as the publisher can deliver that performance the advertiser should not be dictating who, how or when this opportunistic right may be accessed. Link: http://www.masternewmedia.org//#ixzz32pWWJ7ga