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Mice want cheese. If you put a mouse at the start a maze, and cheese at the end of it, a mouse will likely go through a maze to get the cheese. It will likely p

Mice want cheese. If you put a mouse at the start a maze, and cheese at the end of it, a mouse will likely go through a maze to get the cheese. It will likely pay attention to the maze to try to figure out how to get through faster next time. But if the mouse can figure out how to get around the maze, maybe by climbing over a wall, don't be surprised or angry. The mouse doesn't like the maze at all; it's just an obstacle. The mouse just wants the cheese, not the maze. Advertisements are like the maze. In early days, people were forced to sit through them in between parts of shows on the radio. Print ads had to be looked at so that people could find the articles. Nowadays, people are able to get around these 'mazes'. Morally, people might want to support the content-creators, but if you ask any newspaper executive or journalist, guilt can't get you very far for very long. Technology has enabled the blocking of advertisements, and a few mice have had a taste of the easy-to-reach cheese. These mice will almost certainly not go back to trudging through the maze as they did before. Many critics offer a better solution: Make the mice want to go through the maze. This is certainly a more difficult solution than making a banner ad with a logo. It requires a fair amount of creativity, time, and effort. But some advertisers are already doing this. Take a look at the Burger King games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt2do5oV2-8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt2do5oV2-8 Burger King has made their brand fun and engaging, making the consumers want to consume the advertisements. In fact, they pay for them! Now isn't that ingenious? Another example is woot.com. People want to buy stuff, suppliers want to sell stuff. They connect at Woot, and are directly engaged with the product. This is the way marketing is supposed to work. Plastering noise and garbage on a webpage will drive your users to clean it up. They will find a way around your maze.

axod 17y ago
Most people don't think like this. People click on ads every day. millions of clicks. That doesn't help them get the cheese, it helps them find out about new cool products they didn't know about. Those adverts are useful to them. They are glad to have adverts. That's why people who block ads stand at 6% of firefox users, which amounts to maybe 2% of total users. Hardly worth worrying too much about. It's like the people who tell you every second how they haven't owned a TV for years, yet fail to grasp the fact they're nothing like the average joe. For some reason adblock users seem to consider themselves as 'early adopters'. They're not.
- frig 17y ago
  Hypothetical: if I were to tell you that, say, 75% of the net ad revenue on many ad networks was generated by clicks on ads served by adware and spyware, but only, say, 15% of total ad impressions were served by adware and spyware, would you revise your reasoning as to how useful the clickers are finding the ads?
  - axod 17y ago
    We're not discussing adware/spyware. And no, I wouldn't revise my thoughts. All you've said is the obvious - adware+spyware is very effective at generating revenue. Obviously more effective than unobtrusive advertising mingled in with website content. edit: still not sure I quite understand your point here (Or why the downmods). You're saying that adware/spyware generates lots of revenue for ad networks. What does that have to do with the usefulness of advertising on websites?
    - frig 17y ago
      The connection is this: Hypothesis A: ads are useful, people click on them b/c they deliberately want more info. Hypothesis B: ads are useless, people click on them only when they are somehow tricked into doing so. It's obviously the case that out of the set of ad-clickers some are type A and some are type B; the interesting question is the composition of the ad-clicking population. What follows depends on how you interpret adware and spyware clicks: are they clicked mostly out of confusion (b/c the demographic that has adware/spyware-infected computers tends to be the elderly and other "unsavvy" people) or mostly b/c they're useful to the clicker? Depending on how you do your weightings you might have to revise down the % of type-A clicks that're going on (and revise it down again to take various kinds of clickfraud into account). I can't actually tell you if those stats are accurate: I've overheard figures like that from people who might know, but figure they're mostly disgruntled employees exaggerating for effect, so I tend to discount the testimony somewhat.
      - axod 17y ago
        My evidence is mainly my own - I've made money off online advertising for 10 years now. I've never had to trick anyone into clicking on adverts. They do so because they find them useful.
dsingleton 17y ago
By nature only a small subset of ads will be engaging and fun. If all ads were "that good" then they'd all be equally mundane. Ads are an arms race for attention, it's not about being better, but better than the rest.
- azanar 17y ago
  Is the engagement and fun of advertising really a zero sum game? As a thought experiment, I can imagine sample groups of advertisements I've seen where even the best ad would garner my disgust, because it was so unbelievably obnoxious and engagement-free. On the other hand though, given a sample group of effective advertisements, I could imagine being able to indicate the one I would be most likely to click on first. Now this doesn't mean the others aren't engaging and fun. It means the one I indicated is more engaging and fun than the rest, but it is possible they are much more engaging and fun than the former group of crap. At best, I might be compelled to go and visit each of them once I am done with the one before. By that standard, they would all be engaging and fun. But then, I could be thinking about this wrong. Advertising generally works very poorly on me, and so I might not have the proper frame of reference. However, I've found it generally true that a small subset of ads strike me as being engaging and fun to my hypothetical advertising consumer. However, I don't think this is a tautology as much as evidence that more effort and concern will make that subset grow larger.
azanar 17y ago
Many critics offer a better solution: Make the mice want to go through the maze. Or, find the user when they are already looking for a maze to go through, and take advantage of that to entertain the user and get some brand placement at the same time. That feels like a better analogy to me; it's far easier to get a user to play your game when they're in a playful mood already. In this case, the maze is the cheese. :-) Enticing people to go through mazes when they are not in the proper mindset is hard though, even when the maze is compelling and might be enticing given a different mindset. Your potential users need to find out about your toys somehow. I'm not totally familiar with how BK has been marketing these games, but if I'm not in the mood to play a game, no amount of enticing will work. There are a lot of times when I am searching for specific information, and even the most compelling offer of fun and engagement is just an annoying distraction. I guess this is the long way of saying: make sure to engage them when they want a maze to go through, and make them want it to be your maze. Marketing works best when people want to be marketed to.

axod 17y ago

Most people don't think like this. People click on ads every day. millions of clicks. That doesn't help them get the cheese, it helps them find out about new cool products they didn't know about. Those adverts are useful to them. They are glad to have adverts. That's why people who block ads stand at 6% of firefox users, which amounts to maybe 2% of total users. Hardly worth worrying too much about. It's like the people who tell you every second how they haven't owned a TV for years, yet fail to grasp the fact they're nothing like the average joe. For some reason adblock users seem to consider themselves as 'early adopters'. They're not.

frig 17y ago
Hypothetical: if I were to tell you that, say, 75% of the net ad revenue on many ad networks was generated by clicks on ads served by adware and spyware, but only, say, 15% of total ad impressions were served by adware and spyware, would you revise your reasoning as to how useful the clickers are finding the ads?
- axod 17y ago
  We're not discussing adware/spyware. And no, I wouldn't revise my thoughts. All you've said is the obvious - adware+spyware is very effective at generating revenue. Obviously more effective than unobtrusive advertising mingled in with website content. edit: still not sure I quite understand your point here (Or why the downmods). You're saying that adware/spyware generates lots of revenue for ad networks. What does that have to do with the usefulness of advertising on websites?
  - frig 17y ago
    The connection is this: Hypothesis A: ads are useful, people click on them b/c they deliberately want more info. Hypothesis B: ads are useless, people click on them only when they are somehow tricked into doing so. It's obviously the case that out of the set of ad-clickers some are type A and some are type B; the interesting question is the composition of the ad-clicking population. What follows depends on how you interpret adware and spyware clicks: are they clicked mostly out of confusion (b/c the demographic that has adware/spyware-infected computers tends to be the elderly and other "unsavvy" people) or mostly b/c they're useful to the clicker? Depending on how you do your weightings you might have to revise down the % of type-A clicks that're going on (and revise it down again to take various kinds of clickfraud into account). I can't actually tell you if those stats are accurate: I've overheard figures like that from people who might know, but figure they're mostly disgruntled employees exaggerating for effect, so I tend to discount the testimony somewhat.
    - axod 17y ago
      My evidence is mainly my own - I've made money off online advertising for 10 years now. I've never had to trick anyone into clicking on adverts. They do so because they find them useful.

dsingleton 17y ago

By nature only a small subset of ads will be engaging and fun. If all ads were "that good" then they'd all be equally mundane. Ads are an arms race for attention, it's not about being better, but better than the rest.

azanar 17y ago
Is the engagement and fun of advertising really a zero sum game? As a thought experiment, I can imagine sample groups of advertisements I've seen where even the best ad would garner my disgust, because it was so unbelievably obnoxious and engagement-free. On the other hand though, given a sample group of effective advertisements, I could imagine being able to indicate the one I would be most likely to click on first. Now this doesn't mean the others aren't engaging and fun. It means the one I indicated is more engaging and fun than the rest, but it is possible they are much more engaging and fun than the former group of crap. At best, I might be compelled to go and visit each of them once I am done with the one before. By that standard, they would all be engaging and fun. But then, I could be thinking about this wrong. Advertising generally works very poorly on me, and so I might not have the proper frame of reference. However, I've found it generally true that a small subset of ads strike me as being engaging and fun to my hypothetical advertising consumer. However, I don't think this is a tautology as much as evidence that more effort and concern will make that subset grow larger.

azanar 17y ago

Many critics offer a better solution: Make the mice want to go through the maze. Or, find the user when they are already looking for a maze to go through, and take advantage of that to entertain the user and get some brand placement at the same time. That feels like a better analogy to me; it's far easier to get a user to play your game when they're in a playful mood already. In this case, the maze is the cheese. :-) Enticing people to go through mazes when they are not in the proper mindset is hard though, even when the maze is compelling and might be enticing given a different mindset. Your potential users need to find out about your toys somehow. I'm not totally familiar with how BK has been marketing these games, but if I'm not in the mood to play a game, no amount of enticing will work. There are a lot of times when I am searching for specific information, and even the most compelling offer of fun and engagement is just an annoying distraction. I guess this is the long way of saying: make sure to engage them when they want a maze to go through, and make them want it to be your maze. Marketing works best when people want to be marketed to.