You hate them on television. You hate them on the radio. The internet is full of them as well, and you hate them there too. Ads, ads, ads! The bane of “free” content ever since there was content. Means to block advertising have been around since we could tape record broadcast radio or TV shows. But not all advertising is seen as a scourge upon civilization. Some ads could be considered more important than the content they accompany, such as the recent ad surge during football's Super Bowl.

When is advertising bad and when it is good? Should we block advertising or can we all just get along and coexist peacefully?

Follow up:

Advertising has been part of life for as long as we have historical records. Imagine a street market in ancient Ur (what is now called Tell el-Mukayyar, Iraq). Back around 2000 BC, Ur was the largest city in the world with 65,000 inhabitants. It was a crossroads of trade with lively markets selling all manner of goods, both local and imported. You're operating a spice stall selling imported cumin and saffron and you want potential buyers passing by to stop and notice you. You advertise! You cry out, “Spices! Rare imported spices here!”, and people stop and perhaps browse your offerings. Of course some people don't stop, and even those that stop, only some buy, but that's how commerce works.

Connecting consumers to vendors is a necessity, whether you are buying or selling spices or key chains, t-shirts or cars. We need to know about the products and services that are available to us as consumers, just as much as sellers want us to know. When did this important interaction, this mutually beneficial service of connecting us and them become so heinous? Put simply: saturation.

Bad Ads:

Saturation is to blame for souring the simple, essential relationship between buyers and sellers. You cross a bridge and pass a dozen billboards hawking cancer treatment centers and Hollywood Tans. The radio station you're listening to breaks the entertainment flow for 8 minutes at the top of the hour before resuming “commercial-free” music. You get home, put on the TV news and they interrupt it 8 times during the 30 minute broadcast for ads. Frustrated you turn on the computer to check your webmail and in addition to the banner ad and ads in the sidebar, you get a pop-up window letting you know you just won a free laptop! You might even still get phone calls from marketers soliciting new windows. Even if you fire up your Yahoo! Instant messenger to chat with a friend, they helpfully layer in some of the most annoying, flashing, grating advertisements you would ever hope not to see right in the Yahoo window. We're overloaded with ads and they are intrusive. It's no surprise that we try to avoid them wherever and whenever we can. These are the bad ads.

Good Ads:

When are ads good then? When we seek them out! We'll gladly grab a beer and sit down on the couch for the advertising stream during the Super Bowl. We'll flock to funny, entertaining ads on Youtube. We even email each other viral ads, knowing full well that they are advertisements. These ads have been put together to be entertaining first, and informative as an afterthought.

But look a little further at say, Hulu.com. Hulu is a joint venture between NBC and Fox to provide streaming video of TV and movie content. Whoever made the decisions about how to handle advertising at Hulu did it right. If you watch a TV show or movie here, you do get intermittent ads. But the striking thing about them isn't so much that they are good ads, it's that they are unobtrusive, short, and don't give you time to go to the fridge and get back before the show starts again. You don't have time to get up, so you watch them. Even lackluster ads served unobtrusively are good for advertisers, if we actually watch them!

If you can remember back to TV ads in the 60's, 70's and 80's, they used a slightly different model. They interrupted you every 15 minutes, but for about 2-3 minutes, so people would often leave the room to do something else. We got used to this frequency and duration of interruption and quite frankly, it isn't bad at all. But eventually the networks caught on and realized people weren't watching their ads, so they played a little trick on us. They upped the volume of the ad content so we could hear it from the kitchen. Devious bastards.

With the exception of this increase in the audible volume of ads, this was still advertising we could live with, even if we didn't watch it. Hulu's new model gives us ads we can't avoid, but such a small quantity and duration that we don't mind either – it's actually nostalgic and made me think of the times I used to enjoy watching broadcast television (I hope Hulu's ad model works for them, because it's a breath of fresh air in the ad-saturated world we live in). Super Bowl and viral advertising gives us ads we genuinely want to watch because they are just plain entertaining. Entertaining ads, funny ads, unobtrusive but watched ads - these are the good ads.

Good ads, bad ads, and blocking:

We need ads and they need us. We know that there is a cost to providing any service, any content feed – be it broadcast television or streaming internet radio. I think most consumers (or users) willingly accept a modicum of unobtrusive advertising. I know we certainly enjoy well done advertising just as much as any good “real” content we might wish to see. But the bad in the advertising world is just swamping the good. There are too many ads in too many places for us not to take measures against them. I blocked my phone, I blocked my internet, and I stopped watching broadcast TV. I'm a blocker, but I feel bad.

I feel bad when I pop over to Pandora for their streaming music and block their ads. I love their website and I enjoy the music they provide to me, customized to my own specific tastes. But I'm cheating them of making a dime off me. I feel bad when I use Facebook, because it lets me connect to friends and family, and I cheat them of that dime too. It bothers me to prevent every website and every video feed from getting revenue they need to survive and to continue providing me the content and services I want. And the really absurd thing is, it isn't even MY dime I am holding back from them! They get money just for serving ads and more if we click; not from me, but from the advertisers.

What advertisers need to change:

I want to stop blocking ads and here's what needs to happen for me to stop. Listen up you advertisers and you ad servers, media moguls and website content managers! I want you to serve us less ads, in better places, and make them so we don't need to walk away.

The first two points are critical, and I am going to reiterate for emphasis: if you do nothing else: Less ads placed better. Wide screen monitors leave us with less vertical screen real estate and you can no longer serve banner ads. That is where content goes and I will block any ad that takes up my valuable screen space. The flip side is that as screens have gotten wider, you now have easy, unobtrusive space along the sides. Sidebar ads are not offensive, and if done in moderation, are an excellent place to provide me with advertising. Sidebar ads can even coexist with streaming content in the center of the screen, but this segues nicely into the last point - make them so we don't want to walk away.

Obnoxious advertising like Yahoo uses in their messenger window needs to cease. Unsolicited flashing, dynamic, annoying, blaring ads (especially if they have audible sound!) are bad. No one emails bad ads to their friends. If I was in the market for a new mortgage, you can be sure that the last lender I would ask would be the ones that make me want to punch my fist through my screen. I'd even try Countrywide again before them. Ads can be great if they are funny or entertaining. We've proven we will distribute your ads on our own if we like them so make them better – make them worthy. You have a whole bell curve to work with from horrible to outstanding, and the better they are the more we'll watch them. Bad ads only serve to make us angry and less willing to work with you – more apt to block your efforts. Bad ads are bad for the advertising industry and bad for the consumer. I am not even going to discuss pop-ups other than to say these are worse than unsolicited telephone marketers.

The executive summary:

People know what is bad and what is good and so do advertisers. Stop fighting to inundate us with junk and strive to make the experience of linking buyers and sellers fun. Advertising can fully integrate with Web 2.0 and harness the power that interactive feedback can provide. You just can't call it Advertising 2.0, because that sounds as if you are harvesting the web as a resource for your own gain.

• Stop banner ads, we haven't got room on our screens. Use the screen's sidebar real estate effectively.
• Bring us entertaining and funny ad content that we are likely to share.
• Stop bad and annoying flashy ads and never add audible sound unless I click to view intentionally.
• Serve us ads in infrequent, small bite-sized pieces that stop us from avoiding them.

Call it Respectful Advertising. You want us to respect you, but to do that you need to treat us with respect. Respect us as individual consumers, respect our computer screen, and respect our privacy. A good ad positioned to create a happy ad viewer can be a happy customer who advertises for you, for free.