Inclusive, Not Intrusive

There’s a storm brewing this week in the advertising world due to a pot stirring TechCrunch post by Wharton Professor Eric Clemons. He predicts the demise of online advertising due to four factors:

1) Consumers do not trust advertising
2) Consumers do not want to view advertising
3) Consumers do not need advertising
4) There is no shortage of places to put ads

Defenders of the status quo are crying foul and giving the professor a lot of heat. I applaud Professor Clemons for bringing to light that it begins and ends with the consumer. Many in the ad community do not understand that yet. The norm has been too comforting and too rewarding to accept change. The power has belonged to media companies forever, and they are slow to see it slipping away. He is shining a light on the dramatic shift in power and hopefully some will pay attention.

But while illuminating the status quo shift in the balance of power, he also gets caught in accepting the status quo of the existing advertising economy. What happens if we shorten the first three items on the list to one:

1) Consumers do not get compensated for viewing advertising.

If we join together to create a consumer-centric advertising economy, don’t the three doom predictors go away? Consumers will be far more trusting of advertisers, consumers (who choose to) will want to view advertising, and while I won’t go so far as to say consumers will need advertising, some may become quite dependent on it as a valuable source of extra income.

Professor Clemons is right that advertising is broken. But he’s wrong that it can’t be fixed. It’s all about consumers. See what happens as we shift the advertising economy from intrusive to inclusive.