So Gallup released their “Annual Honesty and Ethics of Professions Survey“ this week, and guess what? We suck. We lie, cheat and steal. Advertising professionals rate only one notch above Stock Brokers. Stock Brokers!? This year, that ain’t saying much. Well, at least we’re above Congressmen. If we had been rated worse than them I’d have to move to Canada. I hear Vancouver’s nice, and with Global Warming it will probably be great weather all year by the time I retire.

But I have to ask. Is anyone surprised? Seriously? Look at what we have foisted on the consumer via internet advertising alone.

Complain about pop-ups? Then we’ll try pop-unders. Complain about banners? We come up with rich-media expandable ones that take over your screen. Complain about opt-in? Then we’ll fool you into clicking ok and signing up for a newsletter you didn’t want. SPAM was only the beginning.

We have not raised the bar of advertising with the Internet. We have reduced it to it’s core essence, and that essence is a blinky-blinky buy-now click-here punch-the-friggin-monkey world of intrusion into consumers lives. It’s essence is us. A mirror to society, and society is one very ugly place. Advertising had always been about fantasy. Now? The ugly disgusting dark reflection of ourselves is what we get.

Those of us who strive for ethical practices in advertising create great tools that enable us to deliver ads that are relevant to the consumer. Behavioral Targeting? It should be a boon to the consumer, but what happens is that every technology we create for email, banners, rich-media, are also available to the masses who are not so ethical, and unfortunately there are a lot more of them. We all get painted with the same brush, and to be honest, we deserve it. We are no better at policing our industry than the SEC was with the financial institutions. We all still do not know what we’re doing. We settled for mediocrity, and got complacent.

But doesn’t it seem worse than ever? and is it likely to get better anytime soon?

Sadly? No. Here’s why. We had a chance to turn the internet into TV. What I mean by that is we had a moment when internet advertising was going in the direction of richer advertising experiences that attempted to immerse the consumer in a pleasing way. But the long-tail bit back, and it bit hard.

You see, the long-tail access that the internet enables is a boon for the major brands in order to reach the ever fractured consumer interest. Most smaller brands were unable to afford the high prices of offline advertising, and so the majority of advertising that impacted consumers was national brands in immersive mediums like TV, or full page ads in major magazines. The aesthetic, the art was still valued.

But that long-tail of the internet also enabled something else. The prolific number of smaller business that have been enabled by it are a disaster for the consumer in display media. At least for now. Hold on, I’ll get to consumer choice in a second. God, the impatience of these readers. It’s a disaster as it relates to the aesthetic of the medium of advertising, and aesthetic matters. It matters because of the content it is next to. As much as editorial loves to draw lines between them, they provide a carriage if you will for each other. Vehicles that can hold each other if they complement each other well.

It’s like Cosmo filled with thousands of classified ads of horrendous eye piercing design. No full color spreads, no soft break in-between content; just content, and the next twenty pages filled with 50 ads a page all trying to grab your attention.

Long-tail Access

Search enabled a world that tapped into that long-tail of advertisers, every small business with national access, but they did it in a way that was both relevant (contextual relevance to the search term,) and not aesthetically horrific (a text ad is a text ad.)

But when those same type of technologies enable hundreds of thousands of advertisers to use display media on a national level? Disaster.

“But isn’t more choice for consumers good?” Nope. The consumer gets more choice. But how much choice is enough? Beyond a certain level choice is a barrier. Like a restaurant that has 1,000 items on the menu. How are you to know which of the 200 variation of the pasta dishes is the best? You don’t. You freeze. You become atrophied. In a world of nearly infinite choices the chef decides which choices are best for the consumer. Which he can serve the best. A menu, not an encyclopedia of food. The human element modifies the list of the infinite into something manageable.

What internet advertising resembles is that with every main course you order from that menu of limited options, your side dish is already decided. You could have ordered a steak, and get potatoes… good result. Or you could have ordered steak and gotten a side order of airplane ball bearings. Not too tasty. The advertising delivered rarely has relevance to the consumers main choice of content.

Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi… you’re my only hope?

And so I wrap this up with an odd loop back to Behavioral Targeting. We need a standard for it. We need a few good systems, just a few. Like Search, we should hope for only 4 or 5 systems that could enable the type of behavioral targeting to deliver ads to consumers that are relevant. We should hope to turn the entire banner infrastructure into the equivalent of Google Adwords. Because let’s face it, banner advertising sucks, and it will continue to suck until we deliver the right ads, to the right person, when they need it.

Let’s leave banner advertising to this disaster, and go create something that the consumer loves.

So the next time someone jumps down your throat about not wanting to have their cookies used, or their search terms, or any other perceived “private” data that could be used to make the ads more relevant, remember this post, and tell them to shut the hell up.

One notch above Stock Brokers? Sheesh...