Slashdot Mirror
Auerbach on Internet Cruft
Captain Beefheart writes "Karl Auerbach has a story on CircleID in which he declares '...Between spam, anti-spam blacklists, rogue packets, never-forgetting search engines, viruses, old machines, bad regulatory bodies, and bad implementations, I fear that the open Internet is going to die sooner than I would have expected.' The Balkanization of the 'Net appears to be upon us."
I think what I'd like to see one of these columnists talk about is the state of the advertising industry today. Why is it that some companies feel the need to advertise is such obviously offensive manners such as spam, junk mail or telemarketing? Whatever happened to producing a quality product, advertising in responsible ways and having sales generated based on a great idea or product? Is this kind of "traditional" advertising not working any more?
I think in some ways, the old ways aren't working as well as they used to. People already feel like they're being over advertised to and we tend to tune out tv ads, just flip over magazine ads, ignore banners. But that's not our fault, it's the fault of the industry for shoving it down our throats at every turn.
But at the same time if the ads are for a product that people generally like we do notice the ads, like say for the Lord of the Rings movie or Apple. Too many companies seem to not understand that advertising a product very few people want is going to make your product better. Not every product is worthy of advertising.
So it seems to me that companies with shitty products look at their crappy sales and think they need to go ballistic with Spam, and just through basic odds they'll get some responses and people buying their products. But do they not realize they may be getting a small amount of sales and a much larger amount of customers never to buy their product because they pissed them off with their spam?
Yeah... that time they dumped formula AD into MAE-West realllly messed things up over here. *sigh* ;)