Digital Advertising

Does the rise of the pay wall re-emphasize the role advertising plays in supporting content? In turn, will that make us more likely to share data with publishers in a more explicit deal: data supported advertising for free access to content. And not just unobtrusive advertising but premium, targeted advertising that’s sold at a value publisher’s can use to invest in content.

Every man and his dog, if he works in digital media, has an opinion on this one. Pay walls will, or will not, save newspapers, magazines, books and any other form of printed word. E-readers, iPads and digital paper is, or is not, the saviour of the free press. So, why shouldn’t I wade in here? I may as well be shouted down by those who think that paper has, or hasn’t, got a future.

We’re are moving into a world where there is a proliferation of ‘stuff’ that we all enjoy that we don’t dierctly, pay for. We pay by allowing the product/service to take a fraction of our time in viewing the ad. This proliferation of ‘stuff’ however, means the marketers/advertisers have to spread their limied budgets in an ever-growing number of places.

When we take publisher tools into a multi-platform world we’re taking them further and further away from having responsibly for ‘serving’. In the IPTV world, in the online video world and, to a large extent, in the mobile world publisher tools are making a decision and letting something else do the technical side of the delivery. This is not to play down the important of solid, reliable and timely delivery but it’s just not how publisher ‘ad-servers’ have evolved. In the cable television space we’re already talking about a legacy web ‘ad-server’ as being a ad-decision service and that, more accurately, reflects what we’re doing.