• by Ari Rosenberg , Op-Ed Contributor, April 29, 2005

Delivered with a jovial English accent, this quote came compliments of a cab driver in London where I was recently visiting.

We traveled to the topic of advertising after he inquired what I did for a living back in the States. He then shared how he hates all those "bloody commercials" he has to endure while watching the "telly" and thinks fewer ads would more likely engage viewers to watch them. "Less time to click away to another channel," he added in support of his own insightful claim.

He then went on to tell me in great detail about his favorite commercial.

Consumers' displeasure with advertising is enigmatic because they can always describe their favorite ad. It is not that they do not like advertising, they just do not like bad advertising, and they are growing bloody weary of the sheer volume of ads to which they are exposed.

Not surprising to anyone inside or out of our business, clutter is one of the biggest challenges advertisers face today.

And nowhere is clutter more of an issue than with online advertising. It is almost comical how many ads are squeezed onto a single online page view by publishing companies that have been around long enough to know better. The range of ridiculousness is from four to as many as 10 advertisers displayed on a site's home page or section home page.

There are exceptions that have addressed clutter as a collective problem. MTV.com for example, sells one ad on their home page and no more than three ads, politely positioned along the top, side, and the very bottom of non home page views. The portals Yahoo! and MSN have long figured out how to make more by selling less. Each sells one ad position to the same advertiser (by the day) on their home pages. Then there is CBSMarketWatch.com, which has been a pioneer in selling simultaneously served ad units to one single advertiser (the first time I saw a bottle of Budweiser pouring beer from a banner into a skyscraper I was hooked).

In the offline (print) world, buyers insist publishers provide competitive separation of "no less than six pages" and ads placed opposite anything less than 100 percent editorial usually result in a make-good. However, in online, these rules of engagement do not apply as ads almost always run across from other ads, and competitive separation does not appear technologically viable nor within any terms and conditions I have ever seen.

If publishers are in the business of selling marketing solutions to advertisers, why do so many contribute to the biggest problem their clients face?

Here is why: Publishers who have Web sites that are not generating enough page views to meet their internal revenue goals layer additional ad units onto premium page views so they can meet the needs of buyer demand at the cost of delivering a clean and clutter free environment. In essence, they are making their problem of limited page views, the problem of their advertisers.

There are two steps they can take to arrest this problem. They can invest in developing and marketing their Web content to drive enough page views to meet their revenue goals at a rate of one advertiser per page, or they can lower their inflated revenue goals and base them on a formula of one advertiser per page view generated.

Back across the pond, our friends in London have uniquely addressed the issue of advertising clutter at outdoor stadiums by employing a strategy to serve one advertiser at a time, and the results are visually eye popping.

I caught this approach while watching Manchester United play futbol before a crowd of 100,000 in the arena, and millions more watching from pubs and at home. The sideboards surrounding the field that display ads had just Fuji film featured when I took notice. I would guess maybe 90 seconds later, all of the ads in the stadium rolled into a Pepsi ad and then again to Voda phone, which was boldly written in red letters that matched the red uniforms of the home team that fans were cheering for. Only at the very end of the game, were all the advertisers displayed at once like a curtain call at the end of a play.

Can you imagine what Time Square in New York City, the poster child for advertising clutter, would look like if only one single advertiser at a time appeared on all of the billboard ads that hover above this infamous square?

Publishers could learn a valuable lesson from London's approach to outdoor stadium advertising and from a cab driver who likes to talk about ads.