Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?
Robert Young’s piece about the evolution of advertising on MySpace and other social networks made me cringe. Judging by the comments on the post many others had a similar reaction, though the tone seems to be more about the business feasibility than the social implications. In short, Young suggests that MySpace could act as a “talent agency” to identify users who are brand-friendly, and then use those folks as, in essence, spokesmodels for micro-demographics of their friends.
In the same session I read the thread on Slashdot about Craigslist, where the varied reasons a company might “turn down” huge profits was discussed. The common theme here is when business models and what the people using a service want come into some kind of tension.
In general, advertising models always exhibit this tension, of course. Even in an age of context-sensitive advertising, where the relevance is certainly much better than the broadcast-style interruption model, the ads are still the thing used to pay the bills, (I’m reminded of Comedy Central’s web site, where the annoying Flash ads are literally wrapped in a box that says “Payin’ The Bills” as if it’s “us” (you and Comedy Central) vs. the advertisers.
But, back to Young’s suggestion of having kids vie to be noticed by an advertising executive on-high in order to become a shill to their buddies. On the face of it, I tend to agree with those who think that leaving aside the cultural critique, the business model just isn’t sound, since the whole point of building of the model is to build “trust” between advertisers and audiences (the origin of Young’s idea is that advertisers are scared to have their ads placed on parts of the site, like profiles, that can’t be controlled for content that they would find objectionable to be associated with). Knowing that your friend was trying to get noticed and is now trying to entice you to buy something in order to be rewarded is hardly a way to build trust. I certainly hope that most people would just plain not subscribe to such blatant commercial exploitation of their friends, but I suppose that history has shown people will do strange things for their 15 minutes (or 15 clicks, if you will). I can’t claim to any longer have a finger on the pulse of the youth, but from I’ve seen on the amateur video sites and other centers of peer publishing, they would find some way to appropriate such crass commercialism to their own ends.