With e-reader prices dropping like a stone and major tech players jumping into the book retail business, what room is left for publishers’ profits? The surprising answer: ads. They’re coming soon to a book near you.
To understand why this is inevitable, consider the past few years. The historically staid and technology-averse publishing ecosystem has been ripped apart and transformed.
Take the first seven months of 2010 alone: In April, Apple came out with the iPad and quickly sold over three million units. Apple also launched its own proprietary bookstore, iBooks. In June, Barnes & Noble lowered the price of …
I don’t have a problem reading books with advertisements especially if the advertisements are well targeted to the content in the book.
The targeting is the hard part. I just read today that the mobile phone ad business has reached a billion dollars a year, and that most of it is not targeted. I watch TV online, and they have “does this ad appeal?” button that I have tried clicking 100 times (yeah, I watch a lot of TV) and still they show the same ad over and over.
Facebook is getting very good at targeting, using your social graph along with demographics and user input.. still get an insane number of repeats and misses.
Most of us want sponsored content if it’s somewhat close to what we are reading, viewing or generally interested in… but we’ve got a long way to go down the path to making it work
I wouldn’t mind it as a reader so much but what I continue to wonder as a professional is “are there folks that still pay attention to the ads”. It’s hard for me to advise my clients to DO ad buys when I know as a consumer, that I block them out the same way I block out bad elevator music.
I try to block out bad elevator music, but sometime get annoyed, or even hum along. And once in a while, there is a really good song on.
This argument was popular in the 60’s during the “Golden Age of Advertising”… in “Confessions of an Advertising Man” David Ogilvy told stories of friends taking him aside and asking this about his most successful campaigns. Like it or not, advertising works… BAD ads don’t work near as well, and adding more bad ads just wears us all.
If your clients are running elevator music ads, tell them to stop. If they are ready to ROCK IT, people will pay attention to the ads.
Looking forward to listening to Willie, always an inspiring pleasure and helpful Info!
Looking forward to listening to Willie, always an inspiring pleasure and helpful Info!
you are right.. I just saw his slide and he has packed in so much information!
If you look at crime thriller novels from the fifties and many books from further back than that you will see they are full of ads in the front and back frontispieces, sometimes for pages! And even today it is usual at the end of a novel to read short resumes of similar novels so advertising has always been there in books.