Advertising. What is it?
The answer is in the question. It’s purpose is to inform us of what it is that someone wants to tell us (or sell us). And the person with the most money can tell (or sell) more people than anyone else. At least that’s the way it used to be.
The earliest advert I remember is for Smash, a powdered potato mash product. A crazy advert with a bunch of aliens observing how we “peel potatoes, boil them for 20 minutes and then smash them to bits”…. instead they want us to boil water and chuck in potato flavoured dust made from polypropylene (an edible plastic normally used for cleaning cookers).
When I created the first traffic exchange there was no advertising on the Internet, no banners, no text ads, Yahoo was the only search engine and it didn’t offer any advertising other than the option to add your own URL.
An early Yahoo home page
It was intended to help senior management understand the web. I worked for a large organisation with an admirable attitude toward new technology. They were aware the web would be important and had decided everyone should become involved.
The trouble was there was little point.
Apart from half a dozen websites it was a dull place. The traffic exchange (codenamed web exchange at the time) recorded interesting websites so they could be shared. Users would add websites, rate them, and add a description in mu
ch the same way as a social application such as Digg does today. Other users would be able to browse each website and leave comments.
The product was tailored for use in a corporation and at the time it seemed unlikely it would become an advertising medium. But looking back to 1994 from 2009 it’s hard to remember what it was like living in such an unconnected world.
The power of advertising is now in the hands of the consumer rather than the advertiser. We decide what we see and we must be financially rewarded too. How startling it must be for ancient advertising agencies to discover their new business is modeled on the humble traffic exchange? And where has all that TV revenue gone?
Heck, even a blind chicken finds corn sometimes…..
