Spawn of the Devil

April 20th, 2010

While reading YAP (Yet Another Piece) on what magazines must do to survive the changes in digital technology, radically titled “Magazines Require Innovation, Experiments in Digital and Print” (no, really?), I did manage to get a chuckle out of the accompanying online reader poll (scroll to the end of the article).

The question asked is “What do you think about ads on your mobile phone?”

These were my choices:

spawnofthedevil-question

As folks seem to have an insatiable hunger for all things digital, particularly those left behind in Redwood City bars, I imagined an enthusiastic acceptance of these ads, or at least resigned acceptance. While the response rate was not overwhelming, here are the percentages:

spawnofthedevil

Who would have thought that the digerati wouldn’t welcome the opportunity for one more message from their sponsor? I’ve just rented my forehead to Apple for a year, who outbid Microsoft and Google to place a quite visible tattoo squarely (well, actually somewhat roundly) in the middle. Adobe wanted to attach a Flash player around my neck, but I thought it might get uncomfortable.

“Spawn of the Devil,” indeed! I want mobile ads to be both plentiful and rarely relevant, just like most online ads today. And if we’re really lucky, they’ll freeze all useful functionality in the device while we wait for the HTML5 file to finish playing.