Stop describing advertising as ‘free’

As if by magic, Russell Davies writes:

We need to stop describing ad-supported things as ‘free’. Their might be no exchange of cash but there’s an exchange of attention and cognition. The marketing business justifies a lot of crap on the basis that it’s giving things away for free. If we paused and recognised that they’re not actually free then we might think harder about whether it’s the right thing to do. We might do smarter, better things if we recognise the cost we’re imposing on people without their permission.

I agree that advertising is not free - it’s a cost in terms of our attention, our time. But there’s a further aspect in which advertising costs us. The more relevant advertising becomes, the more likely it is to tell us things that we already know - relevancy here is more likely repetition. The more it tells us about things we were going to take advantage of anyway, the more it’s just a cost transferred directly from its medium to the good or service we purchase. Advertising, done best, directly makes things more expensive.

Quick example: when I buy a newspaper, I’m likely to see adverts for things I’m not going to buy anyway. I don’t drive, but there are plenty of car adverts in the papers. The car companies will never see the money they’ve spent on advertising from my wallet.

That portion of the newspaper revenue that the car adverts support is funded by someone else and effectively donated to me through the paper’s lower cover price. But as the adverts become more relevant, this dynamic changes and subsequently the newspaper, or more likely website, becomes less free to me.

And in between lick and split, in between the car makers and the journalists are the advertising folk’s overheads that I’m funding too.

If the internet works its disintermediating magic then advertising will eat itself. That’s good. Ok?

But go read Russell’s post anyway, it’s dead good.