Tod Maffin is looking forward to the day his satellite radio delivers ads he wants to hear:
“So, let’s take this to its natural next step in, say three years. You call up XM or Sirius and activate your radio. Besides asking for your billing address, they also seek out some basic demographic information. How old are you? What are your interests? Suddenly, your radio begins playing ads that are aimed at you and people like you. With my demographic profile in hand, the satellite service could have screened those (crappy spam-like ads) out and sent me ads specific to my interests.”
I sort of dread going through some long “check the products and services you’re interested in” procedure, but you’d only have to do it once and then keep it updated. Then, maybe once a month, they send me a link to a web page where I see a list of all the advertisers that hit my reciever in the past 30 days. I remove any that I don’t like. Sort like signing up for Netflix. Or, maybe they just have a bot crawl this blog and figure out what I care about.
I don’t understand the fascination with the “let-me-pick-my- own-commercials” model. Seems to me it’s broken right out of the box because, after all, we’re still talking about commercials. In a world where the perfect station is a set of earbuds away, who’s going to want to sit around picking through a bunch of advertisers who want to intrude on that perfect programming?
If a company can’t figure out how to engage a core audience of users with compelling, non-advertising content, it signals an underlying deficiency in the product — not merely a deficiency in the marketing message.