Re: RSS and Advertising

From: David Yancey <dyancey_at_adjunction.com>
Date: Mon 11 Apr 2005 12:47:07 -0500

Ronni Rhodes asks if "ads will have an impact on the growth and
acceptance of RSS? Will the same problems occurring with web site ads
and e-mail marketing crop up in RSS?"

Ronni, you already know as do all the O-A readers that, since marketers
of all sizes are desperate for more leads, better-quality leads,
higher-converting leads, they must necessarily pursue any legal
opportunity to put their message in front of their targeted audience.
The pressure is on sellers, in short. Overnight, in historical
perspective, this trend has changed the economics for all media, from
the oldest to the newest, from falling newspaper revenues to suddenly
monetized search.

It_s more than just a technology shift: in an economy like ours, where a
greater and greater proportion of business operating expenses go for
selling and servicing as opposed to making, the money budgeted for
marketing of all kinds will tend to increase more or less constantly.

As a result, if there is a way to add commercial messages to RSS feeds,
and produce an acceptable ROI, then that will happen.

The only serious obstacles that might prevent it is if consumers react
en masse the way they did with pop-ups. IMO, this is unlikely with ads
embedded in RSS feeds, since the recipient is conditioned to getting ads
with any free content. (FWIW, when a pop-up or other interstitial ad is
contextually associated with the parent page or hosting site_s content,
the expected consumer negative reaction seems to diminish markedly.
Witness the probable consumer acceptance of the NY Times interstitial
pop-ups vs. the sneaky ones that are appended to a page and only visible
once the user is leaving.)

Since we are not about to change the competitive rules, we should not
expect marketers to ignore any commercial messaging opportunity, even in
cases where some would intuitively assume that many consumers would be
offended. Thanks to the web_s wonderful metrics-generation capabilities,
a marketer can learn very quickly if a given messaging campaign produces
sufficient sales or other positives to outweigh the objections of the
few who are angered by the ads.

With RSS feeds, I expect the very great majority of ads to be
contextually relevant, as opposed to typical email SPAM, which, if
correct, will tend to make them much more acceptable to the typical reader.

Yes, there will be delivery and other problems with RSS as it evolves.
But they will be different, for the most part, since the delivery
process is different. One very significant one we are encountering is
the non-technically-savvy consumer_s confusion as to how to find,
obtain, and manage RSS subscriptions.

David Yancey
http://www.vivante.com



Received on Mon Apr 11 2005 - 12:47:07 CDT