Surfers should select their own adverts

WIRED:Companies have to start giving internet users ads for products that they actually want, writes Danny O'Brien

FEW ARE the users who would say the internet needs more advertisements. We see them everywhere; when we search, when we click, when we read the news, when we open our e-mail and sometimes when we close all of those applications, and try to get back to work.

But publishers think they want more advertisements. Advertisers think they want more advertisements, and so we will get them.

Bigger, nastier, and more privacy-invasive advertisements. If only they would listen and trust the end user, we might end up with what we all want: better advertisements.

Advertisers and online readers are in an arms war of studied obliviousness.

Most of us by now have learnt to ignore the ads. Research has shown long-time internet users' eyes pretty much pass over ads as though they didn't exist, and true power users are blind to ads.

They use ad blockers, plug-ins for web browsers that seamlessly vanish banner advertisements and pop-ups, and even the relatively meek Google text ads.

It's amazing how angry this makes marketeers, who claim that using such ad blockers are possibly illegal and certainly immoral. They revoke the contract that advertisers make with readers, they say, the one that says we'll subsidise your daily read as long as you agree to stare at our products.

Of course, you and I have made no such agreement. It is publishers who agree to sell advertisers our "eyeballs". And having encountered one shock as they moved from the printed word to the digital screen, publishers of all kinds are realising a second shock.

They can't guarantee advertisers of anything - and the advertisers know it.

The two particular lynchpins of the old agreement between publishers and advertisers was this: we will place your ads in the same context as our content, and we will wrap our content around it. Neither of those are now possible.

Ad blockers spot the difference between ads and content, and delete one and leave the other. And we no longer need to buy our reading, viewing or listening matter in the pre-packaged chunks that publishers provide.

If you are reading this online, it's unlikely that you have read the rest of this newspaper.

You've perhaps jumped in from the front page, or even a link from some faraway website. And because you're picking and choosing what you read, the advertisements that sit between articles in the printed paper have no place to go online.

Three pages of Christmas bargains would be as non-existent to you as the sports section you so effectively ignored.

So what do advertisers need to do? Firstly, they need to realise that they cannot merely bribe publishers to gain their viewers: they need users to want their advertisements.

They can do that by being entertaining in their own right, which is what television advertisers discovered as they vied against kettle and remote control, and they can do that by being more in accord with what users are looking for.

When better "targeting" is suggested, advertisers generally take it as meaning that they should find out more about their viewers: suck up all the information that go-betweens like Google and other ad placers collect about the end user.

But that's a remarkably blunt instrument. Google can only guess at what its users want and users grow more and more sceptical of Google and other companies' desire to eke out private information from them. The ultimate example is British Telecom's current ugly romance with internet snoopers Phorm, who plan to examine every webpage visited, every search entered and every webform filled by BT's users, all the better to sell them products.

But who is the person who really knows what we are doing online? And who might be the best to pick out which ads to watch? We are, of course. Advertisers always claim that advertisements are only about providing us with guides to what we really want. And if that is all they want to do, we should be able to keep our private information on our computers and have advertisers ask our own PCs to mediate their ads. That's effectively what many of us do with ad blockers anyway.

If advertisers don't want their messages eliminated entirely, then they have to trust us, their users, to moderate and select the advertisements we do want in a more finely-tuned way.

Not manually, of course. No, it would take a special kind of masochist to go through an entire ad campaign voluntarily rating the advertisements that they would want to see in the future (although that has to be better than the system we have now, where ads good and bad are stuffed down our throat).

But our home PCs are smart enough to watch what we're doing, and pick the right ads. Our computers can watch what we read and pull down the relevant ads. And they can preserve our privacy by pulling down a random barrage of ads with it.

And surely advertisers are smart enough to work with us to give us the ads we want, for the products we want.

The question then becomes: who should get the money for those ads? The publishers of content that guides our computer's decisions? Hand over the money directly to us and cut out the middle man? Or just do all this for free, and give the consumer the reward in the lower prices that a cut in a marketing budget might bring?