So editorial and advertising will have to work together, eh?

And the nature of the advertising will be dictated by the story? Or whom it’s targeted at?

Once upon a time this was an anathema. Over the years, I recall many spats regarding advertising people trying to use forthcoming editorial content as a lure to woo advertising.

How the world has changed.

In the digital world, most advertising is geared to the content it surrounds. In fact, the whole Google business model depends on it.

 

And you just need to take a look at how ads are served on Google’s gmail — a subject that Google is sensibly sensitive about — to realize how pervasive, but potentially dangerous such an approach can be. I received an e-mail from a friend of mine in which he described how terribly unhappy he was in his new job, and how he did not fit in the with people around him.

The ads delivered with the e-mail all touted shrinks and counselors! Creepy or what?

Google’s success is a demonstration of the power of its capability. But it raises a number of questions to the heart of what we newspaper folk do.

Let’s assume I want to vacation in Spain. The ads are for hotels and flights. That’s OK.

Counseling required

But what if I regularly read stories about the Manchester City Football club? Should I receive ads for hotels in Manchester or from counselors? And what if my interest is in investment trusts? Or the motor industry? Or Paris Hilton (definitely counseling required)? Where should it end?

It is a wonder of the Internet, and tomorrow mobile, that increasingly advertising is targeted to their audience, their profile, their interests and now their location.

We can all turn the cookie off to prevent profiling, but what happens when the target is a mobile number? And what about the degree of targeting that occurs at the point of distribution?

Who should decide the degree of this pervasiveness? The consumer? The medium? The regulator? Let’s agree that the regulator is everyone’s least favorite choice. But where does the debate live in the publisher’s office?

 In the digital world, there is a real danger that the over-zealous serving of ads can dilute the rightly held values of editorial independence.

More troubling

This becomes even more troubling when one considers that the high costs publishers now pay for editorial are not yet being met by online advertising revenues. More than ever before, pressure is building for news sites to generate revenue to pay for quality.

 I’ve written before about the misuse of the word convergence, but one area in which we are seeing convergence, of a sort, is in editorial and advertising systems. As more digital content is served with tailored advertising, and as search increasingly integrates primary content with third-party content sporting its own advertising, the walls among disparate providers will continue to blur.

As always, the technologists will deliver. But newspaper people need to decide how far to take it, where and when.

Jim Chisholm is joint principal of iMedia, Ifra’s joint venture advisory service. He can be reached at jim.chisholm@imediaadvisory.com.