This is so wrong, it’s painful.
As I have written here ad nauseam, communications tools like Twitter are reinventing the media ether that connects producers and consumers (or services and users). Twitter is revolutionary because it drives down interaction costs (nee “transaction costs”) and accelerates serendipity.
Interstitial advertising increases interaction costs and kills Net-enabled social connections dead.
Luckily, Twitter (and, I suspect, their investors) have already figured this out:
At launch, visitors to Twitter.jp will see media from two clients. One is a new book about Twitter being released in Japan, another is an automotive news service built on Twitter and sponsored by Toyota.
The revolution is in reinventing what marketing actually is, not cramming in a marginally less awful version of the status quo. Toyota and Twitter are on some serious next-gen shit with this. Imagine: a company creating an advertising channel that is opt-in and actually creates some value for it’s customers. As John Hagel has said:
The long trajectory that will shape the advertising business is the move from random interception to targeting intention to seeking attention and ultimately to attracting attentionInterstitial (“targeted,” “relevant”) ads like the ones suggested by the author I linked to above may create some incremental revenue with an only marginal negative impact on interaction costs. However, that is clearly not the “ultimate revenue model.”
Twitter is already giving traditional marketing “the business.”
The future is now.
[thanks to Umair Haque for teaching me all this]
