What Is Valued Based Marketing
As the raging debate about the future of advertising continues, much of the hype is about sponsored content, native advertising, and other mutations of the same old formulas. This is uninteresting to me, not only from a media-nerd perspective, but from a reader perspective. As a reader, I will click on any advertising that I find valuable. Yet for every 10,000 ads I see, I maybe will click or act on one of them (regardless of the ad unit or format), and I know I’m not alone here. While I and many others might be hesitant to act on an ad, this is typical consumer behavior and a barrier that every new product needs to overcome.
Valued Based Marketing Strategy
What follows is an outline for a new type of advertising—TL;DR: The Wirecutter meets The Deck meets good design—one that was formulated foremost with the reader in mind, not the advertiser or publication.
The Three Pillars
1. Curation
Most of the advertising industry today is focused on creating more options for more consumers in the form of targeting and data mining. This has mirrored the ballooning of sites like Yelp, OpenTable, TripAdvisor and dozens of others that allow anyone to post a review but put it on the user to sort through the cacophony. This experience sucks. Sure, Yelp has a ton of information, but it’s not useful information, and in no way is it sorted or presented in a format that is helpful. The same goes for all of these sites—the information is there but isn’t helping the user with their query. Some might say big data is the answer here, but I disagree. Advertising networks that track my every move on the web are perfect of examples of big data at work, yet I rarely click.
This solution is curation, a rather old principle. People have entrusted critics with their livelihoods for a long time, from what movies we see to what restaurants we dine at. Critics don’t always get it right, but they provide us with an informed starting point at a minimum. This is why The Wirecutter, a guide for the best technology, has been so successful. People don’t care about a product having a 6.7 or a 7.2 rating, they just care what the best product is from a trusted source.
What if advertising took the same approach? Instead of trying to micro-target users with dozens of products that they probably won’t like, why not offer them (or simply recommend) the best deal, product or service? I would act upon this information much more often because of this definitive recommendations driving an immense amount of value for me. We humans like value.
2. Scarcity
Another benefit of this new approach is scarcity, something the digital advertising industry is in dire need of. With millions of banner ads floating around the web, the value of each ad, both to users and websites, has dropped drastically. But one ad network hasn’t fallen for it. The Deck, an ad network for creative professionals, is doing well. Websites can only place one ad slot on their site, opposed the dozens that most publications have, and the advertisers are highly curated, so readers know what they are seeing has been vetted. Because of this approach, The Deck can charge advertisers properly and advertisers will pay for this value, since they know their ad is getting to the user effectively.
The same goes for the back cover of the New Yorker, which is a highly coveted spot, one of Apple’s favorites. Apple and other frequent advertisers know the value and exclusivity of this spot, which is why they pay big bucks for it. This all or nothing approach means that instead of advertisers competing for the user’s attention among useless banner ads, which has led advertisers to resort spammy animations hoping to get readers’ attention, advertisers will bid behind the scenes for this premium position, instead of on the actual webpage. This allows the publication to charge more for the each placement, thus making more money, while keeping intact a unified user experience, since there is no longer any visual competition.
3. Customization
Many people have recently remarked that banner advertising on the internet, regardless of its shape or size, was never thought out correctly, especially not for readers. “We tried to do it too fast with banner ads, which never should have been the ad format,” said Marc Andreessen, the prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist, adding “And it’s just kind of been a sort of a race-to-the-bottom disaster.”
This cookie cutter approach also means that every site with banner ads suffers from a design perspective: banners ads are extremely ugly and websites often have to design around them, hindering their ability to build a site for the best reading experience. This plagues most major publications’ sites, across the newspaper and magazine industries, where the site is designed to get users to click opposed to enabling the best reading experience. This is a big problem for a website meant for readers to read things.
This new method allows for increased customization on behalf of the publication, which will benefit the user. A site would sell one spot per day, known as a takeover, to a selected advertiser that has been vetted for the publication’s audience. For Vogue, it might be Louis Vuitton. For Wired, it might be Sony. The website (or ad network, if this became big enough) would work with the advertiser to find one deal or message they wanted to run. Then the website would put the copy into their “ad unit,” which is designed and skinned to blend seamlessly with each individual website. Unlike the disgrace that is Forbes, this unit would be placed prominently, yet not be intrusive.
You might notice that I’ve left the role of images out of this proposal. There’s a chance ads with images could work, but I’m skeptical because of their lack of responsiveness from a design perspective. The number of devices with different screen sizes is proliferating, and text is a lot easier to adapt than images are.
Why this might just work
Readers will go along with this new approach to advertising once they see the benefits. If the New Yorker is putting their stamp on amazing cultural and literary opportunities, readers will bite. If Vogue is giving readers an exclusive deal on a luxury good, readers will go for it. I’m mentioning readers a lot here because they are the users, not advertisers. You can give advertisers all the tools in the world, but if readers aren’t digesting the advertising, the tools are worthless. Publications should be doing all they can to produce value for users when it comes to advertising, just as they do with journalism.
This new approach would also help settle the debate on sponsored content (essentially advertising disguised at journalism), which many people have never shown interest in and more media organizations have made fools of themselves for mishandling than not.
Most importantly, consumers today don’t need to be peppered with more ad choices. They just want the best choices, and reorienting advertising around this premise of more curation, fewer ads, and better design could help the digital advertising industry rebound, and maybe even provide more support for journalism than ever before.
Editor’s note: This story originally appeared here.