If you had the choice, what types of ads would you block, and which would you leave?
I’m not a marketing major or anything, but it seems to me that ads can be broken down into two major categories:  ads that are pushed to consumers, and ads which consumers pull to themselves.
Push Advertising
In the Push method, advertisers try to convince consumers that they need their product.  In some cases this can be a good thing, if the consumer is already in the market for what the advertiser is pushing.  In the worst cases, such as spam, it can be annoying and even deceptive.
The most common type of Push advertising is the shotgun approach, where an advertiser blasts an ad at a large group of people, hoping to reach prospective customers.  This can be effective, although it is very inefficient, and very annoying to everyone but the interested buyers.  In fact this type of advertising is SO annoying that people use DVR’s and products like the FireFox plugin to block them.
I’ve also noticed that the weaker the product offering, the more annoying the ad–sometimes even resorting to trickery and deception.  When products can’t stand on their own two legs, advertisers have to rely on Whack-a-mole games and “You’ve won $25,000” gimmicks.  Although I’m fully able to ignore these, they are annoying and it’s tempting to install something to block them.  Thankfully, however, they are in the minority of the ads I see.
The helpful type of Push advertising happens when a niche content provider exposes new and useful products to his or her audience, related to their content.  For example, when a self-help blogger offers a speed-reading course to his readers based on what he thinks his audience will be interested in, this is actually helpful.  This provides value to both the content provider, the advertiser, and the consumer, a win-win all around.  In my opinion this is the most efficient and unobtrusive type of advertising, and one that is really booming thanks to the ease of producing content on the Internet.  However, there’s also a very real temptation for content producers to compromise their values to make a quick buck.
Pull Advertising
The inverse of the Push method is the Pull method.  This is where consumers are actively looking for information about a product or market segment, and advertisers are able to put product information in front of them.  This form of advertising is relatively new with the Internet.  The only other forms of Pull advertising I can think of are the classifieds section of the newspaper and booths at trade shows.
The epitome of the Internet Pull method is a Google search, where someone searches for “fruitcake”, and gets a list of fruitcake vendors alongside a list of search results showing fruitcake history, ingredients, etc.  To me, this is helpful information, and there are many times when I do a Google search for a product with the sole intention of looking at the AdWords ads for vendors.
The Internet represents both the Push and Pull methods in abundance.  I think that there are definitely times when advertising can be helpful, but there are also many more forms of advertising which are annoying and even deceptive, and which I would love to see wiped off the face of the earth.  I also think that Nick is correct about the ad-blockers, if they’re obliterating ALL types of advertising from the Internet then they could be blocking ads of value as well, reducing the value to both the advertisers, content producers, and even the consumers.  While we’re getting rid of the annoying and useful ads we should definitely be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water.
By Jason Kolb
 

Source: jasonkolb.com