nuconomy blog

For the first post in our new blog, I wanted to address one of the issues I think are most important in today advertising world.
If you’ve been to a long term relationship, you know that one of the most important things is to know how to listen. No, I don’t mean to look like you listen while still watching the game on TV, but to really listen and understand the needs of your partner.
Unfortunately many advertisers don’t understand that although there is no sex in the end, they are still also in a relationship with their customers.
In this hilarious video Microsoft pin point this crucial problem - most advertisers keeps telling us what they think we want to hear instead of listening to what we really want and need. And yes, if we all just stop for a second and really listen we will find out that our users are telling us what they want all the time in many different ways.

Advertisers need to stop the race of page views and unique. These metrics simply don’t tell you the all story. It doesn’t tell you anything about the users’ needs and intentions. The industry should adopt a new model of engagement that will show how users are interacting with brands and ads and how engaging their experience was.
The ads themselves should become much more interactive and allow information to go two ways. Ask users what they want and you’ll be surprised how many of them will take the time to answer.
And of course ads should get much more relevant. How many times you watched a video on the web and had to sit and watch four commercials for baby food when you don’t have a baby?
In the last year behavioral targeting technologies got better, but we still have a long way to go to make it really work. Again, in order to make targeting better, we need to be able to listen to the user in much more than just recording the pages he visited.

In a world where advertising takes a bigger and bigger role in our life, advertisers need to wake up before it will be too late, because like in relationships, trust is something that is very hard to win after you lose it.