Banksy, Billboards, and Targeted Adverts

So I got into a bit of a discussion on Facebook. It was all about some controversial, but interesting, words from Banksy. You probably should go read them, and come back to this. I even set up the link to open it in a new window, because I'm just nice like that.

A former and well-respected colleague, Wail Sabbagh, contended that billboards and the like were little different from postcard adverts in a newsagent's window. How I replied to that is what forms the main thrust of this blog. I said:

"I've spent too much time in the States to let that one pass! I hate in-yer-face advertising, everywhere; unavoidable. It's all "Look at me! Look at ME! Look at MEEEEEEEE!", and has recently led to the trend towards "annoyance advertising" - "It doesn't matter if you irritate the cr*p out of people so long as they're looking." The bloody-awful whistler accompanying one DIY barn chain's adverts is an example of that. In our house, it's target practice time for the MUTE button.

The world doesn't revolve around advertising, but that message hasn't quite reached the US: you have to go backwoodsing to get away from placards everywhere and TV that doesn't let you watch 10 minutes without badly-made sales pitches. It's an extreme - but it's going the same way here.

So I've sympathy with the sentiments behind Banksy's comments, if not his conclusions.

Although I'm not entirely happy with the personal-information culture behind it, I welcome the move towards targeted advertising. Instead of a gazillion products in my face, a gazillion-minus-epsilon of which I'm never going to want to know about, I get stuff that's actually relevant to me and has a chance of making a sale too, if they don't annoy me too much telling me about it.

I will be delighted when targeted, effective advertising undermines the case for big billboards, and for placards blighting every green and grassy roundabout, and we can finally do away with that environmental spam and see the world around us properly again.

Maybe Banksy has a point.

And that set me thinking further.

You'll notice, if you don't have adverts blocked, that there are ads around this blog too. I'm hoping they're targeted; that they are relevant and interesting to you. If they're not, tell me. There are things I can tweak.

Let's take it as assumed that, in a capitalist society, adverts are not optional if business is to survive. (Of course, the same is true in Communist states too, it's just that they're "advertising" state policies, initiatives, propaganda and the like.) Let's also assume that most billboards have little or no effect. They're an outmoded way of promoting a product or company: unless there's something truly novel being advertised, the expenditure is rarely recouped in revenues. There's limited evidence that TV advertising yields any better benefits for the price.

That leads us to online advertising, then. From a business perspective, it's fantastic. At last, there's a direct, tangible link between cost of display and revenues: the "click-through rate" and "completion rate" (CTR and CR) are metrics we can use to determine precisely how effective both the advert, and the spend on it, are. Better still, customer profiling, whether personally-identifiable or anonymised, based on prior purchases and clicked ads, allow the marketing industry to be laser-accurate in the types of adverts shown to a given viewer. They're going to be interesting. It's stuff that the viewer's already shown an interest in seeing, maybe buying. The CTRs and CRs don't lie.

And this could mean the end for billboards, placards, environmental advertising as a whole. ("Minority Report"-style personal promotion aside, but that's a while yet to come.)

The question is...how much privacy are you prepared to sacrifice, if it means we can finally tear down every advertising hoarding in your life?