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    Mark Glaser
  • 14 years ago
    • Categories: Uncategorized

What kind of advertisement would you actually like to see?

There are a lot of ways to get around advertising. You can change the channel or use TiVo or a VCR to skip commercials on TV. You can change the channel on a radio, or listen to podcasts, where you might fast-forward through commercials. You can use a pop-up blocker online. You can ignore outdoor billboards, and airplanes trailing signs and blimps above sporting events. But what advertisements would you actually pay attention to? Funny ones with big production values such as Super Bowl ads? Ads that were very relevant to you and your life? Ads that offered you special discounts? Where would you like to see these ads? Share your thoughts on this question, and I’ll include the best ones in next week’s Your Take Roundup.

Mark Glaser :Mark Glaser is founder and executive director of MediaShift. He contributes regularly to Digital Content Next’s InContext site and newsletter. Glaser is a longtime freelance journalist whose career includes columns on hip-hop, reviews of videogames, travel stories, and humor columns that poked fun at the titans of technology. From 2001 to 2005, he wrote a weekly column for USC Annenberg School of Communication's Online Journalism Review. Glaser has written essays for Harvard's Nieman Reports and the website for the Yale Center for Globalization. Glaser has written columns on the Internet and technology for the Los Angeles Times, CNET and HotWired, and has written features for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, Entertainment Weekly, the San Jose Mercury News, and many other publications. He was the lead writer for the Industry Standard's award-winning "Media Grok" daily email newsletter during the dot-com heyday, and was named a finalist for a 2004 Online Journalism Award in the Online Commentary category for his OJR column. Glaser won the Innovation Journalism Award in 2010 from the Stanford Center for Innovation and Communication. Glaser received a Bachelor of Journalism and Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of Missouri at Columbia, and currently lives in San Francisco with his wife Renee and his two sons, Julian and Everett. Glaser has been a guest on PBS' "Newshour," NPR's "Talk of the Nation," KALW's "Media Roundtable" and TechTV's "Silicon Spin." He has given keynote speeches at Independent Television Service's (ITVS) Diversity Retreat and the College Media Assocation's national convention. He has been part of the lecture/concert series at Yale Law School and Arkansas State University, and has moderated many industry panels. He spoke in May 2013 to the Maui Business Brainstormers about the "Digital Media Revolution." To inquire about speaking opportunities, please use the site's Contact Form.

View Comments (9)

  • Now that I sell underwriting for a PBS station, I pay much more attention to advertising messages than I used to. But I do have to say that the kind of messages that draw my attention most (and always have) were messages I found relevant to me and my loved ones. Of course, what is relevant today, may not be a month from now. There are however a few products that will always be relevant and those items are women's fashion, home interiors, cars and educational & health materials for my kids (not necessarily in that order).

  • When you say "pay attention to" do you mean remember the ad or remember the product? There are many ads out there that I remember (the herding cats ad comes to mind) but I couldn't tell you who it is for. Similarly the ad where the actors/singers/sports stars sit in people's laps - is it a computer commercial or an iTunes type of commercial? I remember the company when the ad is relevant to what I need at any given moment.

  • What I mean by "pay attention" is actually sit and watch it rather than turn it off. Which types of ads do you welcome rather than want to avoid? I'm asking about the production aspect and where you see the ad, and what the content is.

  • Other than a particularly clever or obnoxious ad now than then, I don't really notice advertising...until an ad comes on for something I'm in the market to buy. For example, some years ago I was in the market for a three door auto. Ads for such vehicles became rivitting. My brain seemed to suddenly think there was secret information that would help me in my buying deccision coded into the ads that I would be able to gleen if I paid close enough attention. (This may in fact be so. The car I ended up choosing gave me trouble free service for 160,000 miles until it was rear-ended and totalled. Even then, I escaped unscathed.)

    I find advertising considerably less bothersome than begging. We watch and listen to both commercial and public television and radio, but tune public radio out during pledge drives.

  • I recently wrote a blog entry called "Purina ONE is Role Model for Word-Of-Mouth Marketing" where I suggest that KISS is in the form of the simple celebrity, DJ, personality "testimonial" ad.

    Purina One has been all over it and so has Carnation Instant Breakfast.

    It mirrors the entire "Big Broadcast" method of advertising from back in the day where the show hosts and the listener were aware that there were sponsors and everything was above board.

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