Got five fingers in the air? If so, you're not alone. As I've traveled the country speaking with consumers of every possible demographic, it's become increasingly clear that many, especially teenagers, view advertising as something that simply has to be put up with in order to enjoy free programming, content and entertainment. The savvy public accepts this business model with little dissent because the tradeoff is abundantly clear.

This startled me. After all, I spent untold thousands of dollars going to school to major in advertising, only to learn now that kids not even old enough to have a driver's license understand the basic economic model of advertising. Mama, don't let your baby grow up to be an ad major.

Given this heightened understanding of the ad-supported model, some media properties are giving their customers more power and choice in which ads they are shown, rather than subjecting them to ads that may be irrelevant or downright offensive. After all, I've long lamented that I'm still forced to watch tampon commercials on TV if I happen to be watching a Golden Girls rerun (yes, some guys do).

Web Leads the Way

The first media properties to acknowledge that one-ad-size-does-not-necessarily-fit-all are websites, which makes sense because interactive technology is what best enables any sort of customization. Although wouldn't it be novel if you could choose to pick up a copy of The New York Times For Him or For Her?

A site called Weatherbug.com has a free application you can download to your PC that keeps the local weather on your desktop at all times in the bottom right corner, next to all those other indecipherable icons down there. As you download the free application, you're given the option of choosing which brand you'd like to sponsor it. First you're given a set of generic topics like Finance, Travel, and Small Business. Pick one and you're presented with a list of potential brands to choose from. So if you pick Finance, your necessary evils, I mean "sponsor options", are MasterCard, Wall Street Journal or TheLoanPage.com. Whenever you use the weather application on your desktop, the brand's logo and URL will appear integrated into the design of the application. And you can even change the sponsor later in the rare chance you lose all interest in money.

The best part about this whole process is that advertisers benefit immensely from it: By allowing the viewer/user to select the brand, they'll be seeing a product that is relevant to them - no more car insurance ads for all us New York subway straphangers. Not only are they reducing wasted media space, they're also only required to pay for the number of users who select their brand as the sponsor. It's like a new pay-per-click model, but this time, everyone has to click on something.

Would you pay a fee not to have to watch commercials or would you rather be able to choose the commercials you want to watch? Share your thoughts in the Generation TV Watercooler

Online intellectual bible Salon.com is also hoping its readers jump at the chance to play media planner for a day as well. Upon visiting the site and finding an article of interest, users are then forced to watch an "Ultramercial" if they want to read the article for free. When I went to the site I was shown a Mazda Ultramercial, which involved me clicking through a series of ad pages to get to the actual article - which would not be a pleasant experience had I been attempting this at home on my dial-up slowdem. And as mentioned already, automobile ads are a waste of precious media dollars on this subway rat.

Amazon.com has taken the idea and made it more than emotionally rewarding to view ads - it's also financially rewarding. They recently launched a special quiz box on the site that gives users a nickel in their Amazon account for each quiz they answer. The questions center around your knowledge of the site's products, like its new apparel offering. You could call the method "learn and earn" because the more questions you answer (either wrong or correctly), the more you learn about the site, and the more you earn to spend on the site. By paying users to read their trivia ads, while also giving them a reason to spend money at the site, Amazon has created a vicious cycle of success.

"I'll pay you to NOT watch your ads!"

Not only do these sites give users the power to choose their ads, they also give them the power to not view any ads . . . for a price of course. Both Weatherbug and Salon offer ad-free versions of their sites if the user is willing to subscribe. It will be interesting to see how many people are so fed up with advertising that they're willing to lay down dollars to prove it. After all, once they leave their $30/year ad-free Salon, they're just going to see ads on other sites. No one can afford to pay $30 for every site they visit in order to live in an ad-free world. There's just no escaping them.

Besides, the online environment, I suspect, is also where all these 15 year-old Darren Stevens have best learned that media is supported by advertising. After all, the media's reliance on ads is never more clear, or annoying, than when a pop-up hits you in the face. "I hate pop-up ads, but I know that's how the site gets money" is a teen mantra I hear echoed often. Even commercial breaks on television, no matter how jarring they can be, seem to blend more seamlessly with the actual flow of the programming than a separate window appearing on your PC screen flashing the X10 camera for the umpteenth irritating time.

How might this new dynamic between the consumer and the advertiser affect the world of television? Gradually I think we'll begin to see people grow increasingly intolerant of ads deemed irrelevant to them. Also, as television viewing moves to an on-demand library-based model instead of a linear broadcast, we'll begin to see more video-on-demand that asks viewers to choose an ad to watch beforehand: "Want to watch the season finale of Friends for free? Fine, but you'll have to watch an ad first, so choose your poison: The New Audi, Doritos or a promotion for another NBC sitcom. The choice is yours."

As written about in a recent Next Generation TV column, a company called Visible World is going one step further and making it so that people don't even have to choose the most relevant ad for them - their TV does it instead. Cable operators that integrate Visible World's technology into their cable systems will deliver appropriate ads to households based on demographic data, thus aging Boomers will see ads for aging Boomers, and confused 22 year-olds will see ads designed for confused 22 year-olds.

All this choose your own ad activity signals that the relationship between consumers and advertising is changing quickly. Surprisingly, the new dynamic suits both parties better: While it's true that these new ad formats are giving consumers more power and control, at the same time it's benefiting advertisers because their ads will be more targeted and relevant to viewers (with no effort on a media planner's behalf!) and more effective since it's proven that recall is greater when people have actively chosen to interact with your brand's message.

Wow, a win-win situation for both consumers and advertisers. Sounds like a long-overdue necessary good to me.

About the Author

Ben Grill moderates qualitative research at Sachs Insights, a New York City market research company. By conducting focus groups, ethnographic studies and website usability testing, Grill specializes in understanding how digital technology is affecting the relationships between consumers, media and brands. He can be reached at bgrill@sachsinsights.com or through www.sachsinsights.com.