Tag Archives: personalization

Is Advertising in New Media Doomed?

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For many in B2B publishing, the future hinges on a simple question: Is online advertising viable? The answer, unfortunately, is not yet clear. But to me, at least, one thing is certain: advertising will only work where it is based on transparent, equal, and positive relationships among publisher, advertiser, and consumer.

Photo by Chris Wheal This was a topic raised in last week’s episode of This Week in Google. At about 46 minutes in, the conversation turned to a recent dispute between Microsoft and the Apache Software Foundation involving the way websites track users with cookies, a key requirement for many online advertisers. For unclear reasons, Microsoft’s newest web browser, Internet Explorer 10, comes with user preferences set to Do Not Track, rejecting all cookies by default. Apache, which makes the software that runs most websites, objects, saying users should make that decision, not Microsoft.

Whatever comes of this controversy, the danger it represents is clear. If advertisers are denied even basic information about who clicks on their ads, they will have little incentive to continue advertising. And independent content providers, in turn, will have even less revenue to keep them going.

As “This Week in Google” host Leo Laporte said, how people think about cookies and privacy really depends on how you frame the discussion. If you start by saying that cookies are used to track and collate information about your behavior on the web, it sounds bad. If you say instead that they help websites and advertisers deliver personalized information that you want, it’s more acceptable.

My point isn’t to say that tracking is always a good thing. It isn’t, particularly as used in a mass-media context. But in the healthy sort of relationship between publisher, advertiser, and reader/visitor that you traditionally find in the B2B world, it’s not just a good thing, but a necessary thing. As Jeff Jarvis said in response to Laporte, “media needs to build a relationship with people, but that relationship requires knowing you, and knowing something about you, and being able to act positively on that” (58:19).

In practice, this means two things for publishers. First, earning and keeping the trust of their users is paramount. They must respect their audience and practice transparency in all their dealings with them.

Second, publishers need to hedge their bets and search vigorously for advertising innovations and alternatives. As David Johnson wrote today on MediaShift, the “online advertising experience is awful. There’s no dancing around it, and all the talk about saving journalism isn’t dealing with that fundamental problem.”

Ultimately, audience and advertiser need each other, and will find ways to share their information. It is a necessary relationship. But if independent publishers cannot find persuasive ways to demonstrate their value in that relationship, they will be cast aside with few regrets.

Photo by Chris Wheal

Three Ways to Make Media More Personal

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MUD day 20:

Back in the late 90s or early aughts, one of the hot topics in the Web 1.0 world was personalization. On the industry portal site I ran for much of that time, we had what seems now like a pretty lame concept of personalization. We wanted to let our registered users select their interests from a predetermined set of categories, then present a customized home page when they logged in.

We never implemented our plan, but it hardly mattered. The onset of Web 2.0 and social media, along with the impact of Google search, would have rendered our efforts irrelevant.

But the need for publishers to think about how to make media more personal is, if anything, more important now than ever. There are many ways to go about that, but here are three that should be at the top of every publisher’s list for consideration.

1. Aggregate. Personalization means giving readers the information they want. And they don’t just want your own, original information—they want all the relevant content they can find, regardless of where it comes from. So you must point them to it by identifying and aggregating good content from other sites—even from competitive sites.

2. Treat your editors and other content creators as publishers. The old editor-in-chief, top-down, command-and-control approach to managing a content team doesn’t work in an era of personalized content. To make your content more personal, you have to empowever every person on your staff and give them a bigger role in deciding what content to create and curate. You need to encourage and promote their Twitter accounts and other social media outlets, even at the risk of allowing their personal brand to outshine your own media brand.

3. Treat the readers as your staff. The people formerly known as the audience aren’t just your readers anymore. They are participants in creating and disseminating your content. They are in some ways functionally indistinguishable from your own editors and reporters. In practical terms, this strategy means encouraging and responding to comments and highlighting them when appropriate, offering readers platforms for their work (as the Huffington Post has done for its commenters), and even perhaps hiring them are fully-fledged, paid staff.

As I’ve suggested, these three tactics are neither the only nor the required ways to make content more personal. But any publishers who aren’t thinking hard about how to make media more personal are putting their futures at risk.