red :n.: a revolutionary activist. warning, this will be fragmented, I am writing between customers...but then you all should be used to me being fragmented anyhow. filthy commies. just a reminder, every definition I list on my site is an actual definition of the word, as provided by dictionary-dot-com. anyhow, so, I woke up this morning groggy as a mofo from another one-am-number-crunching session. who'd have thought that spreadsheeting could be so fun? not me! though I'd never want to do it for a living. anyhow... in the shower I pondered some of the things that Travis was saying over skype last night. every where we look tools are springing up to get around advertising content, TiVo, streaming video online, podcasting, you name it. advertising gets in the way of the user experience. very few people -like- advertising, it is intrusive, annoying, and often obnoxious. so, we have all these people getting around this big part of the economic backbone of our consumer society, the advertising industry because advertising is, frankly, outdated technology. they jump ship from media to media almost as fast as advertising can come in and exploit it. so, yeah, people are leaving Travis' product and scooting over to 'the other guys'. makes sense right? is the problem T's product? now, the other guys product is basically the same, only difference is that it's a lot less tied into advertising. give them a few months and the advertising industry will be on them like flies on shit. ads go where people go, and where ads go people flee. so what is the solution to this? advertising has to change. it needs to become user friendly rather than this agressive intrusive beast, especially when it is touching anything to do with the internet, where people can just jump ship to the next big thing in the blink of an eye. adding useless features to your product won't save you if users are constantly suffering through pre-loading adverts and dancing logos everywhere. my thought: build a small, non-animating logo space into the web product/service/whatever. just a small logo space for adverts in the bottom corner. yes, current advertising people will balk and say 'hell no, that's not enough impact', but frankly, advertisers can be more than a little retarded about what people respond to. logo and hotlink it to your advertising website and people will click and go to it if they are interested. and you make it interesting by making the advertising fun. never understimate the power of a crappy flash game. coca cola have flash games all over, and people sit around playing them for a few minutes to half an hour all the while soaking up the coca cola logo and getting a craving for some cola. makes sense to me, people are participating in your advertising happily. who knows though eh? the internet has really changed how people get, produce, and consume content. maybe the next wave in advertising is to let people make it themeselves. ( sorry all you designers out there, but customer created content is king, people who have ownership of what they've made or done become fanatical. even if it is ugly. ) that may be a neat thing to do... an advertising agency that doesn't make ads, just makes tools and an environment for customers to make their own commercials and advertising... hmmm...