The Purpose of Advertising

A recent Seth Godin post about changes in the way advertising has been changing over the last quarter-century ends with an interesting quote:

"The winners, I think, are the agencies and the pundits and those that would like advertising to be more than it actually is."

He makes the point that advertisers are more interested in creating a short little movie that spreads - which if you think about it is exactly what everyone on YouTube is trying to create.

Bloggers are trying to create compelling writing that holds the interest of a (probably quite select) group of readers. Is this the same thing? Not really, in my view. Most bloggers aren't doing it for the money, but to promote their opinions and share their knowledge, but there's still the desire to promote a particular point of view - even if successful promotion doesn't result in the reader buying something.

While there's always a chance that a successful blog will attract enough readership to make advertising a money-earning proposition most blogs aren't going to be popular enough to attract advertisers. Yet still their dedicated authors keep pushing out the material. Just like I do, I suppose.

For some reason a number of posts were stuck in the blog as drafts. This one is from February 2007.