TRUSTVERTISING - Written by Dmitriy

TRUSTVERTISING

While driving to work in the morning and listening to the ever soothing news of U.S. economy slowly crumbling into a recession to a mellow jazzy tune mixed by the folks on NPR station, I had a privilege to listen in on one conversation about online advertising and its near future focus. A few weeks ago I heard a piece about one of Ebay’s top brass “leaving” the company to work for senator Hillary Clinton’s campaign. In that piece the host and one of Ebay’s execs talked of how the most important features that will be focused on this year by websites and web based businesses is web security and even more importantly, trust. Trust here means protection of identity, enhanced privacy, financial credibility, and a variety of other security measures aimed at creating a comfortable non-intrusive space for the consumers to flourish and create a social network in.

What the morning piece today revealed is that trust is exactly what web advertisers are focusing on as well. Or more or less its exploitation for advertising. The thought process here is as follows. It is becoming more prominent through social networking sites and instant messaging for you and your friends to find funny videos and separate pieces of interest. What is becoming more and more of a reality is that these videos have some kind of advertisement plastered around them. A good example is youtube videos that have a TV show ad popping at you at the bottom of the tube window or hovering a mouse over a keyword that pops a window with directions to the nearest drug store(?). What the morning piece heavily discussed is the deliberate focus on propagating these kinds of ads through what they called friendvertising. Basically a strong focus on using your friends as advertising vehicles, to get to you, by enticing them to share the content with you that on the surface (puppies) is un-comparable to what the core (pepsi) might get in return. Whilst your friends perhaps are not paid (?, unless of course you have more than 1,000 friends) for doing this, they are susceptible to share news blurbs and pop culture without realizing that they just became a billboard.

Now I already regularly deny emails from my friends to check out videos of cute kittens and other short term memory distractions. This has nothing to do with my friends themselves or for that matter it is not a reflection of my more-of-a-dog-person personality; but it directly has to do with the fact that I am simply overly aware that wherever I will click, an ad will click back at me. This for the longest time has been the strategy of spam marketers that is slowly being more controlled through unsubscribing initiatives and laws. The problem is that now spam will come from friends that you have an actual trusting relationship with. What seems to be the biggest point of contention for me is that focus on “trust” here is not to benefit the consumer but rather to exploit the possible trust links between people as advertising vehicles.

This raises a few topics.

Is this fundamentally wrong or just a different and quite genious way to get the people the products they desire?

Do we see a shift in inter-personal trust due to an increase in advertising and advertising vehicles?

And finally would the choice ever become exclusive between kittens or friends?

I hope I’ll never have to decide.

Dmitriy Aristov