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Advertising Forgot You Remember

Do you remember when you were walking down the street and you saw that billboard for an injury law firm, so you punched the billboard and were teleported magically to their offices?

How about that commercial break during an episode of Friends, for a brand of tooth paste. Do you remember kicking your TV and bottles of toothpaste falling out of it with the shattered glass and smoke?

If you don't remember these events, why do online advertisers want you to hit their banners right then and there, which is so different from how you are used to getting advertisements? Because, you know and they know, that if they do their job right, you'll remember them later, when you need to.

In this light, I propose a new advertising model for the Web: AdMarks. I see ads for things all the time that I would buy, or want to buy, but that doesn't mean I can buy them right now, or have an immediate need for them. I'm not about to follow the banner, open a new window up, read about it, bookmark it, and come back weeks later to my bookmarked ad. I might if it was easier, though. We need advertisements that bookmark when clicked.

Of course, we need useful things to do with those bookmarks later. We should be able to search them, for when we want to buy that thing we saw a week ago. When I search a shopping meta-search site, stuff I AdMarked should come up immediately before anything else. When I'm walking around in Target with my smartphone, the bluetooth chips in the shelves should tell my phone to alert me about something I was interested in. When I happen on the website of the thing, it should know I was interested in one of their products and tell me more about it. When I've earned enough Customer Reward Points, they should just send me one, since they know I want it anyway.

I'd love to see Google do this with AdSense.

Comments

Steve Spalding said…
Great idea, I think I read something about the concept. I really think that allowing people to use ads as "real" content is a great way to increase click-thru and add value for advertisers.

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