Wednesday, February 04, 2004
I really hate a lot of the marketing we see on TV, on the internet, and in print ads.
The thing I hate most about marketing is when ads straight out lie. Examples:
The cable TV commercials that say you shouldn't switch to satellite TV because of expensive equipment, bad service, and outages during weather. Actually, the equipment is free, the service is cheaper, the customer service is better (80% customer satisfaction vs 30% with cable), and I've never had my service go out.
The commercials for Japanese cars that claim they are now like their German competitors. These cars have definitely come a really long way in the past few years, but I'm sorry, they aren't German cars. Most of them are still front wheel drive! But ads like these will make car buyers not even test drive the German cars.
Because of TiVo I watch almost no commercials on TV. But that's not enough. I think we can do more to get rid of advertisements that I feel just waste my life.
For example, right now I pay DirecTV about $40 per month for 150 channels. But of those channels I only watch about 10 of them. I think I should have the option of paying $5-10 per channel and getting them commercial free, pretty much like HBO. I don't want to pay for all these channels I never look at.
Then there's the internet. Years ago we made fun of companies who made money from users clicking on ads. It has gotten a lot better since then, but there are still too many crappy sites out there with no purpose but to make money off ads, and screw up search engines by creating bad results.
There are less ads now thanks to web browsers that block popups and IM clients like iChat that don't have the ads that AIM does.
There should be a system where every website has a tiny icon in the corner of the page. If you find a website useful and interesting, you just click on that icon and they get $0.20 or something. Over a month you might spend $10 on internet usage, but there would be no ads!
Basically I feel I would rather pay a few extra dollars here and there and avoid all the crappy ads I see. Paying for TV channels and websites a la carte will force these producers to create better content. A channel like MTV won't come out with MTV2 and put more garbage on TV, just because they know every cable company is going to carry it. We won't all be paying for the Golf channel because 10 people out there watch it.
I know a lot of this isn't realistic. Advertisements are definitely a necessary way to communicate new products and generate revenue. Basically I want to be more in control of the content I get. In an ideal world, new products would become successful not because of marketing, but because they are actually good products and word of mouth helps them spread.
The thing I hate most about marketing is when ads straight out lie. Examples:
The cable TV commercials that say you shouldn't switch to satellite TV because of expensive equipment, bad service, and outages during weather. Actually, the equipment is free, the service is cheaper, the customer service is better (80% customer satisfaction vs 30% with cable), and I've never had my service go out.
The commercials for Japanese cars that claim they are now like their German competitors. These cars have definitely come a really long way in the past few years, but I'm sorry, they aren't German cars. Most of them are still front wheel drive! But ads like these will make car buyers not even test drive the German cars.
Because of TiVo I watch almost no commercials on TV. But that's not enough. I think we can do more to get rid of advertisements that I feel just waste my life.
For example, right now I pay DirecTV about $40 per month for 150 channels. But of those channels I only watch about 10 of them. I think I should have the option of paying $5-10 per channel and getting them commercial free, pretty much like HBO. I don't want to pay for all these channels I never look at.
Then there's the internet. Years ago we made fun of companies who made money from users clicking on ads. It has gotten a lot better since then, but there are still too many crappy sites out there with no purpose but to make money off ads, and screw up search engines by creating bad results.
There are less ads now thanks to web browsers that block popups and IM clients like iChat that don't have the ads that AIM does.
There should be a system where every website has a tiny icon in the corner of the page. If you find a website useful and interesting, you just click on that icon and they get $0.20 or something. Over a month you might spend $10 on internet usage, but there would be no ads!
Basically I feel I would rather pay a few extra dollars here and there and avoid all the crappy ads I see. Paying for TV channels and websites a la carte will force these producers to create better content. A channel like MTV won't come out with MTV2 and put more garbage on TV, just because they know every cable company is going to carry it. We won't all be paying for the Golf channel because 10 people out there watch it.
I know a lot of this isn't realistic. Advertisements are definitely a necessary way to communicate new products and generate revenue. Basically I want to be more in control of the content I get. In an ideal world, new products would become successful not because of marketing, but because they are actually good products and word of mouth helps them spread.