Content and advertising: have we lost the plot?

I have just spent the Easter weekend watching "Game of Thrones". In the old world it would have come onto TV, I would have watched it week by week and as I watched it I would also have consumed a whole bunch of ads.

But no. Somebody flicked me a pile of AVIs and I rolled through them. And it was great.

But one day it will come onto free to air TV. And they will be playing by the old rules, that I'd be dying to consume this content and in return I'll watch the ads, the advertisers will pay them and the world turns.

Bup Bowwwww!

I don't know what the answer is, but the commercial TV model - these days - is only a part of it. More so I think it's finding out what each person's content stream is, and trying to be a part of it. Or at least be somewhere around it.


So in my FB stream above, there's the sidestream ads, and the instream ads. My buddy Ervin Sim looked at that late last year and we might have something to say about it soon. And that's only one of my streams. I look at a twitter stream, about three blogs, email and TV.

I think advertisers have a big job on their hands. To be honest - as I was viewing that ten hours of HBO content I was truly saying to myself "I'll pay, with my eyeballs. The commercial model is fine. Find a way for me to view your ads in exchange for this excellent content I'm watching"

But I'm not sure they even understand the problem, let alone have an inkling of the solution.