Advertising changes

A couple of items about advertising caught my eye this week, which is unusual. I spent so much time toiling in the editorial vineyards, I literally have to make a conscious effort to see the ads on the rare occasion that I read a newspaper.

The latest of the two items, was something passed along by Jeff Jarvis, who found this at a blog called Englishman in New York:

Rocketboom … producer Andrew Baron and presenter Amanda Congdon are about to find out how much that’s worth. Next week they will auction off Rocketboom’s first week of advertising on eBay.

What makes this auction even more interesting is that the winning bidder will have to relinquish control of the advertising to Baron and Congdon who are going to make the adverts themselves. If a company insists on making its own advert, then Congdon and Baron will vet it (and exercise a veto) before it runs. And this policy will apply to all future adverts on Rocketboom.

According to the blog, Rocketboom gets 130,000 downloads a day, making it the deserving darling of the video blogosphere. (If you haven’t seen it, go check out a couple of the episodes.)

Auctioning off advertising isn’t new but it is rare for a title to go directly to the market and ask, “What’ll you give us?” Jeff Jarvis wrote:

99.999 percent of media buyers won’t get this. But somebody will be cool enough to try.

I suspect a few more than .001 per cent of media buyers will get this. It’s small scale, but it removes those buyers from the picture. To use the buzzword, it disintermediates them and disrupts yet another facet of the media.

And so does this, reported early in the week by Steve Yelvington.

…Spot Runner…lets small businesses schedule local video advertising on cable/broadcast systems.

It’s the local TV equivalent of Google’s Adsense, a way for small businesses to buy advertising without having to talk with a sales rep, worry about production details, or for that matter put on a pair of pants. Like AdSense, it’s inexpensive and it’s something an entrepreneur can do at 11 p.m. or 6 a.m.

Basically, you log on to a Web site, pick a generic ad and then plunk down plastic to take care of individualized voiceover and ad placement. Steve sees it as a way for small advertisers to get into the game (he points out that most newspapers and broadcasters don’t call on the majority of potential advertisers in their market).

These may be small things in the multi-billion-dollar world that is advertising, but they are reminders that everything about media is changing. And, of course, online classifieds and sites like craigslist were once small things, too.

TAGS: MEDIA, ADVERTISING