This Space For Rent

So we’ve got ads on the top of the computer screen. We’ve got ads on the side. (Just look over --->) We’ve got ads that float around and you have to chase to close. (“Where’s that X?”) And ads that just take over the screen for a few seconds, which always seems to be a few seconds too long.

That pretty much covers online advertising, right?

Nope, as Arizona State’s Tim McGuire noted recently, now certain words are for sale in some stories in the Arizona Republic:

Ford Motor Company owns football. American Express owns Texas. Pitney-Bowes owns business. If you didn’t know that you haven’t been reading the Arizona Republic’s AZ Central.com this week.

Without fanfare AzCentral has started to put two green lines under words in stories on the Money section and the Sports section. It appears stories in news and local sections are immune, but the web site has ways around that. It also appears that the underlines can change from minute to minute.

These ads are an interesting alternative to the more intrusive ads that impede you from your destination, but I have to think that the ‘rotating’ associations for each word will end up cancelling out the ad’s power.

Like, if I see that ‘football’ = ‘Ford,’ that’s an association I can remember. But when ‘football’ equaled ‘Ford’ 10 minutes ago and now it equals ‘McDonald’s’ and 10 minutes after that it equals ‘Dick’s Sporting Goods,’ then that’s just getting to be a bit too much. Reading a news article shouldn’t remind you of the game show “Concentration.”

Then there is the issue of associations that make sense. Take for example this article about a coffee shop named Bad Ass Coffee. One of the purchased words is ‘franchise,’ one is ‘Japan’ and one is ‘Victoria’ in the words ‘Victoria’s Secret.’ But don’t get ahead of yourself, bucko. When you roll your mouse over ‘Victoria’ it is an ad for Delta Sky Miles.

That association might make sense for Tom Brady – trying to catch up with his supermodel girlfriend during this bye week – but not for the rest of us mortals.

But there are ‘impulse buy’ scenarios where this sort of ad could really work. If I were the newspaper sales team, I would track down local sports franchises and movie theaters to buy little ads. That way, if a local team was mentioned in the article, you could click on the team name and get sent to the Albuquerque Isotopes website to buy tickets. The same thing with a current movie like 'American Gangster.’ This could really kick in, with a little creativity.

As long as these stealth ads refine themselves internally and stick to the sports and business (or life/arts/style) sections, then they may prove to be a service to both the readers and the newspapers looking to slow down the financial losses rampant in the industry.