Technology advances make advertising a hard sell

Wired on Friday: One of the most compelling descriptions of the media's current business model was given to me years ago by privacy expert Simpson Garfinkel. "Everyone thinks that the adverts are selling the products they advertise. They're not. They're selling you."

It's true: from television companies to newspapers like this, to thread-decorated websites that you visit, all of that advertising has been sold to third parties on the understanding that you are watching, or reading, or patiently clicking through their product pitches. The advertisers have sold you nothing (yet). It's your time and attention, and demographic data that's been sold to the advertisers by the media.

That makes it sound rather dire, but it is in many ways a fair (and overt) deal. In return, you get subsidised content, content which is generally far more impartial than it would have been had subtler trades been negotiated. Better that the media should sell you out than buy into whatever the advertisers are hawking, and agree to stem criticism or bend editorial content into praising their goods to the heavens.

The fact remains though that it's not a deal that you explicitly made. The media is selling goods under somewhat false pretences. Like the conman selling the London Bridge to gullible Americans, they can't promise your attention to someone else, because they don't own it.

With modern technology, you can control where your attention goes far better than any middleman. In web browsers, one can download adblocking programs like Ad Block Plus for Firefox that make banner ads on most web pages disappear. Television ads are skippable using digital video recorders like the TiVo. The content of many newspapers is being separated from its accompanying advertising by programs like RSS readers, which serve up to readers only the text that they want to read.

This has not pleased many of the advertisers, nor the media that depend on them. Last month, an executive at the US television channel ABC announced they had discussions with cable TV providers to disable ad skipping on their packaged digital video recorders.

"People can understand in order to have convenience and on-demand (options), that you can't skip commercials," ABC's president of advertising sales, Mike Shaw, announced. Independent DVR manufacturers have been pressured into limiting their ad-skipping, removing prospective features that could detect and leap over ads in one block and replacing them with clumsier five-second jumps. In 2005, Japanese broadcasters claimed that skipping ads was a violation of local law, and designated August 28th "TV commercial day" to raise awareness of the necessity of ad breaks.

The likelihood of such plans being successful are pretty minimal. You can try to chain viewers to their TV sets during the ad breaks, and ban nipping out to the toilet until the required quota of bad car ads is complete, but fighting your customers' wishes was never a winning, long-term strategy.

Some TV companies are attempting a slightly less combative stance: devising "TiVo-proof" placements that have a high chance of being watched even by those skipping the ads. US broadcasters, for instance, are now selling five-second segments at the very end of traditional ad breaks. TiVo's fast-forward bounces back five seconds before playing to take into account viewer reaction time, so the chances are that a small ad placed just before the TV show recommences will be seen.

While ingenious, this sounds as much like trickery as bludgeoning viewers into seeing your adverts with threats. More innovative still is the new US network CW, formed from the merger of Warners' WB and Universal's UPN networks. CW claims they will drop traditional advertisements in September, and replace them with 30-second "mini-shows". The spots will prominently feature an advertiser's product, but have plots and character development that will continue over each commercial break.

The truth is that commercials now have to compete on their own merits as attention getters, rather than hoping they can piggyback on already popular content. The first sign of this comes as Nielsen, the US ratings organisation whose audience figures determine which shows survive and which are cancelled, announced its first "commercial ratings" system. Advertisers will know for the first time how many are viewing their ads, not just the shows those pitches are embedded in.

That's something ad clients have been pushing for some time. The theory is that it gives advertisers ammunition to lower ad prices, and obtain a more realistic view of how ads are being watched.

But it's a double-edged sword. TV advertisers and broadcasters alike should compare how their current business works with that of Google's advertising network. When you include Google ads on your website, the search engine company constantly monitors how well - how many times - those ads are clicked upon. If your ad isn't working, it's taken out of the running. That means that advertisers have to pay less, but it also means that their products are not being advertised. Google's system optimises for the best ads, not the most predictable placements or the widest viewing for the cheapest productions.

And that may well be what the future of commercials and ads is in all sectors: a battle not to buy as many viewers as can be sold in the slave auctions of the old advertising model, but to create ads that are compelling and attractive enough to catch the eye of a overactive and discerning audience. We're no longer the product being sold to advertisers, but the flighty clients of advertising, ignoring what we don't want, and challenging lazy ad executives to up their game to match our needs.

Danny O'Brien is activism co-ordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation