Should I... Can I...

Have you ever pondered over striking the balance between what you can do and what you should do? Too many times in business we forget about the should and go straight for the can... and the greatest example of that is display advertising. No matter how targeted the ad can be, and Facebook is an example of allowing you to hyper-target your ad, you have to ask... is the ad an intrusion or part of the experience? Ads are at a premium on health search sites like OrganizedWisdom because the ad is extremely relevant to the consumer desire; a solution to their current malady. Ads are ignored on sites like Philly.com because the ads are totally irrelevant to the content on the page. Ads are ignored on Facebook because the ad is an interruption to the user experience rather than an integral part of it. We are trained to ignore the sidelines because that is where the ads are. We have no attention span and no interest in looking around for information buried under ads or 10 pages of content... hint, stop worrying about page views and start focusing on user experience. The greatest example of not getting it is IPhone applications. Businesses and brands by the thousands are building applications because they have an outlet where they CAN reach consumers everywhere at anytime. Here is the problem, did anyone stop to ask if consumers really want your information at their fingertips? If so, will they pay for it or use it enough so that you can charge someone else to distribute complimentary content within your application? Most of the time the answer is no, they won't pay and they won't use it more than once a month if you are lucky. So why spend time and money building an app to get buried in the AppStore?... because you can. Every time a new way of reaching consumers comes out marketers drool over the numerous ways that they can now reach their target customers. Most advertisers don't take the time to develop a real business model... how they make money, how they drive adoption, what are the success metrics in terms of usage and revenues? They jump without thinking and it becomes yet another load of dung that they threw at the wall and hope it will stick. To all the brand and product managers I leave you with this simple example. Think Orbitz; when you search you get an ad to buy a plane ticket from an advertiser. The content that the consumer wants is the ad.