Contextual Dissonance

Contextual Dissonance – When clearly commercial content is offered during a time when I’m not in commercial mode, it just feels off.

John Battelle nails that feeling you get when you notice a brand trying a bit too hard to insert themselves into a conversation. To advertise at scale on the web brands resort to algorithms. But trying to algorithmically insert an ad unit into a newsfeed [rarely] [ever] [works].

Conversations require you to listen and respond. If you aren’t really listening, you’re just talking at someone. That is the value of a media property, they aggregate an audience around a topic and host the tone and theme of that conversation. Because they play the host, they are that much better able to match the advertiser to their audience.

This matchmaking is why advertising on a media property is so much more effective than on a social media site. For several years the conversation has moved away from media sites to social media sites and the advertisers followed. But I feel the pendulum is swinging back the other way as brands realize that they are more effective in getting their message across on media sites which share their audience and interests.

This is not to say advertising on social media sites is in danger. There will always be room for diversions of entertaining snippets sprinkled throughout. But substantive marketing pieces that inform engaged readers will only work on vertically-focused media sites.