Ads deserve permalinks too
Posted on 27. Apr, 2009 by matt in Matt's Adventures and Musings
Twice already this weekend I have wanted to reference an advertisement in a blog post and been unable to link to that ad. I do all of my television watching online, usually watching on sites like Hulu that provide permalinks for shows, episodes, comments, etc. However, I have yet to find a permalink for any of the advertisements on those sites. In our media-conscious world, we are almost as likely to discuss an advert as we are to discuss an episode of a television show or any other video content that you’ve attached the ad to. Let’s say the mantra: If it’s valuable, it deserves a permalink. If people might discuss it, it deserves a permalink.
As our modes of media consumption change, advertisers are being forced to adapt. The most effective adapters have taken to creating ad content that is independently valuable in the eyes of their target consumers. This is a great thing and it should be encouraged. We should and do reward innovative advertisers by talking about and sharing their ads. This would be so much easer to do if they gave us permalinks to use.
You may ask how this is different from viral video advertising, or you may point out that many ads (especially funny ones) already show up on YouTube. Well, there is certainly a strong connection, but there is an important difference in attitude. The notion of viral videos has built up in the venue of YouTube and social networks. It carries a connotation of low production values, simplistic themes, and playing to the finicky, meme-obsessed banality of the crowd. The stuff of viral videos gets dumped into the swamp that is YouTube (or one of its clones) and is left to fester. Those who watch the videos are treated like little more than flies. I, the consumer, am reduced to a tick on the view count and possibly a comment on the generic video viewer page. By allowing a YouTube URL to be the defacto identifier of your content, you’re basically conceding that the content doesn’t deserve to be treated with any distinction.
Our cultural shortsightedness regarding the web, its possibilities, and its future usage is comical.
Note: In the sense that I’m using it here, permalink == URI (Universal Resource Identifier). Yes, this post is basically an argument that ads, like everything else, should be treated as nodes in the semantic web (aka Linked Data Cloud).