Curated Consumption Supports Ad-Only Channels

Steve Outing reports of an all-commercial TV channel in Britain, the Advert Channel. "Yes, that's right, 24 hours a day of commercials, with no pesky programming to interrupt things. Of course, this would be just a crazy idea if some TV commercials weren't funny and entertaining. But commercials are getting better, because media trends are forcing them to: TiVo watchers who fast-forward past commercials; radio listeners who can now avoid ad-laden commercial radio by subscribing to satellite radio services or instead downloading music online and listening on their portable MP3 players. For broadcast advertising to avoid becoming irrelevant, it must become entertaining."

Ads are up for becoming actual first rank or complementary content, gradually merging, intertwining or even superseding traditional content. The concept of Adfeeds in RSS or ad channels distributed through dedicated web pages, newsletters, alerts, SMSs is certainly per se not new. What is new is the emergence of a set of new opportunities creating the stage for a possible new way of promotijng and marketing services on the Internet:



a) opportunity for individuals to subscribe to pre-filtered and carefully selected products and services aggregated for them by their favourite news/opinion/fashion opinion leaders. Curated consumption is here all around us. We just don't see it.



b) traction for publisher and authors who can cover with increased value their favourite topics while providing multiple dedicated adfeeds covering the products and services that they personally recommend.



c) option for merchants not to have to rely anymore on an interruptive approach to marketing.



d) opportunity for merchants to gain credibility and traction by allowing publishers to cure consumption according to their readers demographics, focus and editorial strategy and personal preference.

In my view what we may see emerging in the near future is:



1) A new class of advertising agencies cloning and refining the track laid out by Blogads. These agencies will be providing a very rich pool of well categorized and focused sites that can be used as outlet and advertising channels.



2) The same agencies will also have the opportunity to gather and categorize potential merchants that wants their products marketed on highly personalized and trusted communication channels. These advertisers do not provide final ad text or banners but simply a value for the clickthrough they are willing to pay from selected and qualified outlet channels.



3) Independent media publishers not only select advertising partners from a large pool of potential targeted contextual advertisers provided by the above-described new agencies but also write the ad copy and select the best placement and distribution channels for each. Publishers have all of the interest to identify best performing, credible and valuable products/services and to word in a credible, personal and genuine way the value they perceive is offered through those products.



Again, curated consumption is the name of the game.



What do you think?