It is not surprising to see these results and thanks Joe for responding to Justin's observation. 

It is important to call out why TV advertising is less annoying and more helpful.  TV ads interrupt the user experience and are placed at the beginning, middle and end of professional content.  In Internet terms, they are full page rich media ad units a.k.a. interstitials.  Not sure why we negatively label a full page rich media ad on the Internet as intrusive when it is totally acceptable to run 4 30 seconds spots on TV every 10 minutes. 

I believe it is the Internet industries fault for thinking a banner would work and for trying to completely reinvent how to advertise to a consumer.  The point is, we as an industry have trained consumers that content is free and it will not be interrupted with advertising, whoops!! Let me restate that, WHHHOOOPPPSSS.  We must undo this mess that we have created and over time the consumer will accept it. 

So, for advertising to work, it must interrupt the user and be relevant.  Much is being done around relevancy however there continues to be privacy concerns.  SponsorSelect has reinvented behaviorial targeting by simply asking the user to select the advertiser they want to have sponsor their experience.  This will ultimately be available on cable when the next generation set top boxes that leverage OCAP become available over the next 3 years.  More on this later.

We have an opportunity to not only reduce media waste, but to eliminate it all together.  Precise self targeting that leverages contextual data sets to ensure relevancy of advertisers to choose from is the right solution.  The solution is no more interruptive than a 30 second TV ad however performs better for the advertiser. 

With the right advertising solutions in place, more content can be made available to consumers for free thus creating the right value exchange. 

Respectfully,
Shane Lundy, SponsorSelect Inc

good to see PaidContent is up for proper open discussion. Keep this up it plays to your favour massively. So many sites still try to manipulate perceptions but transparency "wins the hearts".

Wins the audience..
You just earned a star from me….

Thank you for removing the photo.

Hi Justin and KennyDo,

The survey was sponsored—but by Harris Interactive and AdWeek—which are independent (Harris is a polling firm).

You're correct that a better comparison may have been online video ads and TV ads.

However, I still think it's an interesting general observation, although of course it raises lots of additional questions. For instance, just because someone says they ignore online ads, that might not actually be what they in fact do.

The link in the article goes to the survey document, which contains some additional details in case you're interested in learning more although you'll see that there are not many more than what I included above.

Joe Tartakoff, paidContent.org

Hi Craig,

I found the photo on Flickr using a Creative Commons search, so I thought I had permission to use it. Clearly that's not what you intended, so I took it down (I actually can't find the photo on Flickr anymore either—maybe you took it down—so I can't tell you exactly what permissions you granted when you uploaded the photo).

Joe Tartakoff, paidContent.org

The photo illustrating this article is being used without permission or proper attribution. It was stolen from my Flickr account.

Paid content, indeed.

Fuckers.

I agree with you Justin. Whoever wrote this really poor article needs to understand that they need to create content that more comprehensive than the rubbish they just posted. Also people don't compare like with like and it is now really annoying.

Wouldn't it be more accurate to compare internet VIDEO ads with TV ads?  I smell a sponsored study here.