Online ad endgame: Relevancy or bust

Dave Winer's advertising-in-the-age-of-Podcasts manifesto makes some interesting points:

• We're seeking out info all the time, so why not deliver ads as the info we're seeking (paid search, contextual ads, etc.)?
• Ads (info) forced on you when you don't want them are bad. (TV, radio, etc.)
• Create commercial info that's informative, respectful and entertaining.

What Dave's basically saying is that non-relevant ads have no place in the modern online advertising environment. Users tune'em out. (Which is why some ads are getting bigger, more intrusive, more in-your-face--a losing battle.)

Online ads not only must become content, they have to be good content (a rant I've made before). That in and of itself is too much of a leap for most marketers and agencies. Yet it's not sufficient to produce results.

As Dave Winer reminds us, the ad must be relevant. Sure, we trigger relevant ads by keyword searches, but that's a no-brainer. What about searches that turn up NO relevant ads? Or what about good old-fashioned article pages that aren't searches at all?

Unlike Google, search results only make up a minor portion of a typical B2B Web site. We lack the volumes to support a pay-per-click model or a search-only ad model. (For 8 years I've explained to our advertisers that 95% of their ad impressions are on pages OTHER than search for their product category. But against the noise of Google, that message never quite gets through.)

In this ruthless ROI-oriented ad world, ads, like people, must perform. And those that don't will be dropped, much to B2B publishers' peril. I live my days fretting over whether my advertisers' ads are good enough (getting there), and whether I'm making them relevant (could be doing a much better job).

As Web site operators, we need to start moving away from displaying random ads. In a perfect world, there should really be no such thing as an ad rotation. By using a combination of site registration data, behavioral targeting (last few screens this guy clicked was X, so on the next few screens, let's show ads for X) and contextual targeting (even via something as basic as a common taxonomy used to tag both articles and ads), every single pageview--regardless of whether it's a search or article view--should be an opportunity to serve an ad that fits the visitor like a glove. This may not be possible in consumer marketing, but jeepers, should be easier to achieve in B2B. And darn it, if we don't know whether the ad is relevant, maybe we should stop displaying it in the interest of focusing more attention when we do display an ad.

Users would love it, and so would advertisers. But to make that happen, we need help from the users. Wouldn't it be great if users, upon visiting a B2B site for the first time, were told, Hey, we have two versions of this Web site...the "clean" version where the only ads we show are relevant to your needs, industry, buying cycle, etc., or the typical in-your-face version in which we shove vast quantities of ads down your gullet whether you want'em or not?

To make that happen, users would need to check a couple of boxes indicating interests. The form would have to be really simple. If we could pull that off, would the lure of relevant-only advertising be enough for users to take the plunge? And would we as B2B site operators retain enough impression opportunities to sustain a viable business model by severely restricting the display advertising this way? Perhaps too utopian, but we should be heading in that direction.