Man Is The Media.
My interview on Advertising Anarchy
March 14th, 2008 by Martin
I had the chance to talk about online advertising etc. on Advertising Anarchy’s blog a few days ago. The blog takes a critical look on advertising in relation to the massive SXSW festival and is run by Door 3, including a few of the guys from the brilliant Austin subculture magazine, Misprint. A few highlights from the interview below.
About advertising:
Advertising is a fact of life and I’m pretty sure most people see it that way. From the little I know about newspaper history, journalism more or less grew out of an advertising leaflet. Now we’re witnessing almost the reverse phenomenon, where consumers don’t want to pay for their information and you need a business model that relies heavily on advertising to sustain itself. The good news, however, is that ads this time around are much more targeted online than with print. And in my opinion a highly targeted ad is not a nuisance, it’s simply just a great service, as long as it’s served in non-intrusive way.
And a long hairy argument for simulating outdated real world formats in contemporary information design.
You could argue that it’s almost reactionary going back to the book-format now that we have hyperlinks and the never-ending web page. But obviously that’s the way print has always been created and that’s a determining factor. Although I’m a huge fan of the web’s flexibility and ability to always guide me towards more relevant information, I think the bottomless page in essence is rather dissatisfying to the average person, and I believe that constantly changing context and subject with links is still very disorienting to many. I see the Issuu magazine format almost as a metaphor, not unlike the way iTunes continues to talk about ‘albums’ although it hardly makes any sense online. But you know the magazine, you know what to do with it and you know it will only hold a limited number of pages. I don’t think you should underestimate the strength of the familiar when you think of the constant change that is the web reality of today.
Read the whole interview here.
