Idea: Literal Ad Choices
What if advertising worked more like Reddit?
The other day, people in Here’s Where it Gets Crazy — a Facebook group for fans of the excellent Stuff They Don’t Want You to Know (STDWYTK) podcast — were complaining about the ads on the show.
This is the post that started the conversation:
STDWYTK has been around for who knows how long, but at some point it got acquired by iHeartRadio or whoever they are, which is like the CNN or Fox News or whatever of…radio, I guess?
I don’t really know what iHeartRadio does, just that they’re a big player. That’s irrelevant.
Anyway. So they give you this thing called “AdChoices.”
This thing is a lie.
I know this for sure because I went down a very boring rabbit hole that I don’t care to relive in order to confirm it.
You have no choice about the ads that you see, because [reasons].
It’s basically marketing nonsense.
What if we could actually *choose* which advertisers we hear from?
This could be cool.
It could also give ad agencies a reason to up their game in terms of content.
Ads are pretty universally terrible everywhere. At one point my only Twitter activity was dedicated to publicly shaming dumb, irrelevant ads that show up on my account.
Commercials on television are my version of nails on a chalkboard. I’m highly sensitive to PEOPLE TRYING TO JAM INFORMATION INTO MY BRAIN THAT I DON’T WANT TO HAVE IN MY BRAIN FUCK OFF PLEASE AND THANK YOU.
Tons of money gets spent on ads. In spite of the Surveillance State and Big Data and so on and so forth, ads still suck pretty much across the board.
Interrupting this article with my favorite commercial of all time
Have you seen the Dear Kitten videos? Specifically the original one.
This is actually a Friskies commercial. But more importantly, it’s also an amazing piece of content that I’ve watched — and forced other people to watch (like I’m about to do right now with you, Dear Reader Friend) — I honestly don’t know how many times.
It never gets old. I love this commercial.
It’s so good, I can’t even explain all the things I love about this COMMERCIAL (you know, those loud annoying things on TV that we build technology to avoid watching unless it’s Superbowl for some reason).
It’s perfectly cast.
The cats and the voice actors are perfect.
The Monster Known as Vacuuuuum forever changed the way I pronounce Vacuuuuum.
It’s so good.
Back to our regularly scheduled programming
So here’s my pitch, future users and investors: what if we made commercials like it’s the Superbowl all day every day, just without the football and traumatic brain injuries?
Here’s how it would work:
You get ACTUAL ad choices. You can upvote and downvote ads.
This gives advertisers data on what people do and don’t like. Awesome, right?
You also get to tell the AdBot system which brands you will never ever ever care about no matter how many fucking times they shove the same stupor messaging in your face.
Maybe people would start sharing and caring about ads. Maybe we’d have less Propaganda. Maybe advertising would become accessible to companies without a huge money budget but who are overflowing with Creator Capital?
Maybe we, the users of RealAdChoices or whatever this thing would be called (maybe SuperAds?), could even use our attention capital to submit and upvote brands that we love. Maybe there could be some kind of ad budget and talent pool like a GoFundMySuperBowl ad for your favorite local bakery or whatever.
I’d like to live in a world with better, more entertaining and relevant ads.
What about you?
