Whistler
We went to Whistler for the last time this season last weekend and met our
friends Ben and Leslie who left the fief for
interesting to talk with people who work on ads since I usually agree with
professors from UMass who said
advertising and marketing should be illegal. Google does a surprisingly good
job of it though and I think it’s an evolution in advertising that I hope other
channels will start to adopt. Namely, the ads are subtle but unmistakable,
highly relevant, and generate close to no waste. I think this addresses what I
think are the chief problems with most advertising - it’s obnoxious (flash
animations that fly across the screen), manipulating (ads that make you think
you’re clicking something else), completely unrelated (think random banner
cycling or spam), or wasteful (printing + shipping + mailing + delivering ==
waste).
The DMA will send you a brochure
extolling the virtues of direct marketing basically along the lines I just drew
up. Unfortunately, their idea and the conventional idea of targeted marketing
means sending you a huge Pottery Barn catalog. I hope as long as we’ve got
marketing that it can all try to be as smart as Google.