ideahaus : creative + intelligence

The never ending job of advertising: getting eyeballs to our messaging.

But what if they won’t come to us?

A recent article in MediaWeek (Washington Post Eyes Widget Ads) reports the Washington Post is experimenting with using widgets to help target the consumers their advertisers seek. Ken Barbieri, Director of Business Development suggests, “From a strategic sense, we came to a realization that investing in bringing eyeballs to our sites was going to be more difficult over time, so we want to deliver our content where people [already] are,” he said. “We want to be medium agnostic.”

Can we be medium agnostic? Traditions aside, isn’t one of the big sermons from the Web pulpit all about netiquette, social graces and privacy?

“In an ideal world, we’d love for them to click through to our site,” he said. “More and more what you see is this content is going to be consumed where the readers encounter it.”

I’m very interested in the customer service but I wonder what’s the backlash when you overstep the already gray lines between giving you the news and shoving it down your throat?

Great stuff to debate. What do you think? - kp