Hate Ads? Don't Just Get Over It

I think we're all well aware of how I feel about advertising. What is interesting, though, is that while I completely despise it, I'll admit that it is the bad apples that are spoiling it for everyone else. If it weren't for the annoying car commercials, I wouldn't mind TV ads all that much. If it weren't for flashing banner ads, I wouldn't be so opposed to online ads. It is because these forms of advertising exist that I hate it. Jeremiah Owyang writes about how people that hate advertising need to get over it. I don't really agree. His first point is that it isn't going to be going away. I'm fine with that, and I'm not so stupid as to think it would. What I want to go away are the ones that fall into his other point about the shotgun approach. Ads are like shotguns, in that it just gets thrown out there, and even if you weren't the ad's target, you still might get hit. These are the ones I want to go away. Obviously, these won't just disappear altogether, but I'm all for it moving more towards what he calls the laser approach. When an ad has a precise target, and that target is all that is hit. When this is precisely tailored, you get a situation where everyone wins. The consumer, me, only sees items that are of interest. The advertiser doesn't waste money shooting their ad to everyone, even though not everyone is interested. This means that a much higher percentage of those that see the ad are likely to buy their product. If I see ads for refinancing, I'm just going to tune them out. This means that someone just wasted money for me to see their ad, and have absolutely zero chance of getting a customer. This is why I have no problem using all of Google's personalized services. If they are going to show me ads, I want them to at least be something that interests me. And really, those little text ads they do, they don't bother me at all. I rarely even notice them, and have actually even clicked on a few because they are relevant to me.
Now I did say that I don't wholly agree with him, and here's where I don't. He says to just "get over it" to those of us that despise ads. I don't think that we should, though. If people simply accepted that ads are there, and didn't complain about them, then there isn't as much incentive for advertisers to change things. Sure they still have the driving force of attempting to make more profitable advertising, but without consumers giving feedback, they won't have all the data to go on. Of course, this battle would be won a lot easier if there weren't idiots in the world that actually did try to hit the bouncing monkey. I stand by my opinion, though, that if we don't like what they're throwing at us, we shouldn't just sit patiently and hope that they change it, we should help to try to facilitate the change.