Advertising: The real and the fake.

I like advertising.  Good advertising.  I think most people do.  Take a look at the view counts for Super Bowl Commercials and you will see the interest.  We are naturally inclined to want good products and advertising is the medium used to connect us to those products.  There are advertisements that are comical, touching, fascinating, and memorable.  Then you have the "junk ads" and this stuff drives me crazy.  Junk ads are the reason that so many people install Adblock Plus in their browser.  It is also a reason many people on iOS are willing to pay for an app in order to avoid ads that are distracting and annoying.  I pay $10 a month for an Rdio subscription and the annoying ads in Pandora is just one of the reasons I quit using Pandora long ago.  I decided to open up Pandora the other day and after choosing my station, this is the next thing I saw.  

Let's discuss all the problems with this ad:

1.  It looks shady.

2.  It is completely obtrusive, totally covering what I really want to see on the screen.

3.  It looks like an ad for a site that was designed in 2000.

4.  It is not relevant seeing that I am married.  This same ad would also not be relevant to women or     children.

I'm not exactly sure how advertising should be done on mobile.  It is brand new territory that is going to explode into a huge business.  Apple introduced iAd in 2010 with hopes of capitalizing on profits to be had from mobile advertising.  I don't love iAds myself but they are much better than the ad model used on Pandora.

I'm excited to be entering the world of advertising at such a unique time.  A time when radio, television, internet, and mobile advertising as we know it is changing drastically.  I hope to find a way to produce great stuff and never be associated with the garbage that plagues the sidebar in Facebook or the annoying pop up ads for games like Words with Friends or apps like Pandora.  

Here are a few examples of quality ads.  

The City Creek Project by Struck

Note: I personally believe that the kind of advertising used on the Pandora ad and the examples of good advertising that I listed here are not in the same category at all.  The problem is that many people just see it all as "advertising" and so it is worth pointing out that one type of advertising is going after quality and another is simply just a cheap, "in your face" quantity type ad.  I hope to produce the former and reinvent the later.