Y Combinator: Fix Advertising
Paul Graham at Y Combinator has posted a great list of startup ideas they’d like to fund. Among them – fix advertising.
Advertising could be made much better if it tried to please its audience, instead of treating them like victims who deserve x amount of abuse in return for whatever free site they’re getting. It doesn’t work anyway; audiences learn to tune out boring ads, no matter how loud they shout.
What we have now is basically print and TV advertising translated to the web. The right answer will probably look very different. It might not even seem like advertising, by current standards. So the way to approach this problem is probably to start over from scratch: to think what the goal of advertising is, and ask how to do that using the new ingredients technology gives us. Probably the new answers exist already, in some early form that will only later be recognized as the replacement for traditional advertising.
Bonus points if you can invent new forms of advertising whose effects are measurable, above all in sales.
I couldn’t agree more.
One Comment, Comment or Ping
Josh Chambers
Yes! Thank you! Finally some people talking about advertising from the ground up. We don’t need more 30 seconds spots shoved into formats that simply don’t accommodate them. We need a new model.
Aug 25th, 2008
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