E-books, the new frontier of advertising?

[Bob Russell]

Advertisers leave no stone unturned, so it seems. Routinely, in TV shows and movies there are product placements. You don't see a Coke can instead of a Pepsi can in the hands of a hot character by accident or just because the script called for him to hold a pop. There's big money in getting your product on the screen, and advertisers work it for all it's worth.

Advertising potential has been explored and exploited for everything from race cars (is there anything on a NASCAR racecar that isn't covered with ads?) to space rockets, to every aspect of a sports team and the associated sports venues.

In fact, there was a ruckus not too long ago, because tv shows were using some new technology to change actual city scenes to remove or replace actual advertisements with the ones that they preferred to show. So when you see that sign on a building on TV, don't assume it's really what the building looks like. If you are a sports fan, you've probably noticed what looks like a painted ad on the field during game coverage. It's not always painted. The network will sometimes superimpose a graphic that makes it look like it's on the field, but without the messy paint, and easily changed to another ad at the next commercial break. It's only a cyberspace figment of an advertiser's creative imagination.

So what about e-books? If advertisers are so interested in getting their product in front of people, why don't we see free e-books that are ad supported. You know, with pages and pages of ads like a magazine. Yuk! Or maybe it starts out gently with ads on the first few pages, the last few pages, and either at the page borders or chapter ends. It's not a road that I'd like to see us walk down, but surely it's coming. With an electronic media like e-books, it could be a free for all, and maybe web page ads are even a closer analogy.

Well it turns out that, according to the NY Times(free registration required), ads have already made the leap to books, and right now they are aimed at impressionable adolescent readers. We don't think much about ads in magazines even when it seems to be every other page. But do we really want to see e-books turn into e-ink billboards? If the jump to books and magazines has been completed, then it won't be long before we see an e-book ad invasion.

Certainly, it will depend a lot on customer acceptance, but people seem to accept anything if it's done incrementally and slow enough. We're like the frog that doesn't realize it's cooking in boiling water when you heat the water up slowly. The bigger question seems to be how far ad placements will go. Is the ultimate goal of such ads going to be to slightly ease the cost of e-books, or will it end up being a ruthlessly exploited new revenue source? I think we will see publishers looking to maximize revenue, not the customer experience. That means that if it doesn't significantly affect our e-book purchase decisions, then you might just find that when you read an e-book, half of the content is ads.

Let me conclude by reiterating my previous in-depth analysis of the possibility... "YUK!"

Via LISNews.

[erwin]

Ads in books and money bills. Hmm... where I read something similar... ah, yes in "THE SPACE MERCHANTS" (1953) by F. POHL & C. M. KORNBLUTH...

[cades]

Hello,

I think, static ads are not of interest in e-books!
Today we are only laughing, if we see some old ads in some old books where they tried it.
What they will dream about is, to have unremoveable space in the book and a desired Online "time" to actualize that space as a necessary feature to continue reading this book.
So the market for converting e-books to useable e-books will still grow...

Best regards

Gregor Reucher

[rmeister0]

I have some paperbacks from the early 1970s with cigarette ads stuck in the middle.

It is bad enough having full motion video adverts on some web pages; they are annoying and distracting. If they spread to eBooks, I'll stick with paper where I can ignore them.