Are you imaging a new 60’s free love decade coming on? No ok good. What I’m talking about is the emergence of products and services free for the consumer and paid for by advertisers.

Most of us are familiar with the concept of products and services offered free to the consumer and paid for by advertisers. A good example of this can be found on television. Unless you are using Pay TV, you get the main channels and entertainment free. But the catch is that you have to endure constant ads every 8 or so minutes. Most of us seem to have accepted this fact. If we want to watch TV we have to watch ads. And we can always flick to another station. But how would you feel if advertisements started encroaching on other forms of your entertainment?

Imagine this. You are huddled up on the couch, under a warm blanket. It’s raining outside and you are reading your favourite novel. You have been engrossed in the story for over an hour and have hardly glanced away from the pages of the book. You then turn the page and see an advertisement. How do you feel? Probably frustrated by the intrusion and not really in the mood to take in a new product, service, or brand.

Some marketers say advertisements like these will someday allow the consumer to enjoy free books. Great, free books at a price. Now I’m sure I’m not the only marketer asking myself, “How effective is this advertising really going to be?”  A person enthralled in a book is surely not going to read the ad before moving on to the next page, are they? Let alone take in the information in the ad, or be in the mood to act on any of the information they have seen.

The other obvious example is the Internet. The vast majority of content on the Internet is free. How do these web companies make money?  Through advertisers. But as we become more accustomed to seeing banner ads, advertisers have to step it up to be noticed and achieve the same results as the year before. So now when you go to a website you often get a pop-up ad over your screen which stops you from seeing the website you visited.  It is just another intrusion frustrating the users, and in the long run this cannot be good for the advertisers either.

As a marketer myself, I think we need to think back to the fundamentals of marketing. The key to marketing is finding a gap between what is needed and what is available, and then filling that gap. Simple, straightforward, and effective marketing that is informative and not irritating.