Online advertising still off the mark

Dave Morgan of Tacoda has a thoughtful opinion piece in Media Post today about the failure of online advertising to live up to its potential to target viewers’ interests. He points to a compelling statistic from a 2005 Roper Public Affairs study: “only 21% of people said that advertising adds to their enjoyment of the Internet, versus 47% for magazines and 47% for newspapers. “

Wow, that’s backwards, isn’t it? In theory, online advertising should be more useful and enjoyable because it’s more relevant. But as Morgan points out, advertisers are still stuck on banners and buttons and leaderboards. Most efforts to make ads more effective have so far just made them more intrusive. Does anyone else get offended when they go to a website and an audio ad starts playing? Nevertheless, the online ad market continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Imagine what would happen if advertisers got it right?

Personally, I’ve had fun recently looking at the ads that show up in my Gmail box. I find Google’s choice of what ads to show me based upon the content of e-mails is entertaining and often funny.