Marketing: Targeting vs. Serendipity
but, i have no objection to noise - thru my many years selling advertising and targeting and profiling and media and such, i constantly reminded buyers that targeting often becomes the crutch of the lazy non-creative marketer — a useful tool of course but a severely limiting one, by definition ruling out educating prospects about new things and things they maybe didn’t know interested them. which, IMHO, is maybe the most powerful form of marketing (because it involves the thrill of novelty and true discovery)
so while ads in feeds is a perfectly OK (and inevitable) idea such advertising needs to have permissions and opt-ins and -outs just like any other medium — and also just like any other medium, ads in feeds will be mostly noise and only occasionally signal and even more rarely, transactional
Originally posted as a comment by Steve Kane on A VC using Disqus.
