Reliving 2011, brick by brick
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My favorite example of good advertising is the way Rolling Stone magazine worked when I was a kid. Back then, there was still a recording industry doing a brisk business in plastic stuff, so they would provide at least half of the content you might find in Rolling Stone. The ads were often the best part. I guess fashion magazines like Vogue still work that way. Clearly, there was a lot of care taken in placing the ads next to the right articles, and running ads that readers loved.
Ad blocking software works because there are telltale technical cues that a site isn’t paying the same level of attention to ad content as they are to editorial content (whereas print magazines pay more attention to ad content–that’s how they work). So I think there are solid business reasons for serious content sites to run their own ads, skipping DoubleClick/Google, Federated Media, and all of those remnant networks. The missing link here is the value that those networks provide to advertisers: auditing and other metrics.
