• by Thom Forbes , January 10, 2011

If you've not looked at the 30-minute video in which Chris Anderson, curator of the TED conference ("Ideas Worth Spreading"), lays out the rationale for his organization's "Ads Worth Spreading Challenge," I urge you to do so. First, if you're in the business, it will boost your self-esteem. As someone who is "building intangible value," Anderson will tell you about halfway through, you are in "an heroic business."

Don't underestimate the importance of self-esteem. A new study posits that the desire to feel worthy and valuable trumps almost all other pleasant activity -- including sex, drinking alcohol, eating favorite foods, seeing a best friend or receiving a paycheck -- among college students studied by researchers, according to UPI.

But more critically, on the road to laying out why TED has initiated a competition to find ads that "raise the bar, elevate the craft and invent new forms of online engagement," Anderson delves into why the market places so little comparative value on online advertising today. On average, you get about a dollar per hour of attention for print advertising, about two bits for TV spots and less than a dime for online ads.

Anderson thinks this figure should be much higher. And one of the reasons it's not is because, he says, no one has really figured out how to do online well. He says that advertisers look too much at the amount of people that their advertising is reaching, and at whom they are, but not enough at the intensity of the attention they pay to the ads. Unfortunately, online advertising has not reached a point where it's generally worth our paying intense attention to as consumers.

Anderson certainly got my attention when he described his own bête noire as being pre-roll advertising because it is mine, too. I railed against it as being contrary to Internet users' expectations when it first started in the mid-1990s but it has become so omnipresent and accepted, I figured I must have been wrong. In any case, I'd lost the argument.

But pre-roll video ads "hijack your attention," Anderson says and that is counter-productive. While consumers suffer though 15 to 30 seconds of a product pitch to get to the content they clicked for, they're stewing internally, resenting the product that's on their screen. You do, don't you?

Advertising doesn't have to be this way. Before his involvement with TED, Anderson founded a company that published hobbyist magazines. Readers love the ads, he says. They were considered every bit as interesting as the editorial content.

"They didn't ambush passion," he claims. "They amplified it."

We can all cite publications that work the same magic for us personally, whether it's Mother Earth News or Vogue. And this, of course, is the quality that makes TED itself so engaging. It amplifies people's passions, and their ideas become infectious.

Anderson also explains the thinking behind transforming the TED conference from being an exclusive, face-to-face, for-profit gathering for about 800 people a year into the nonprofit, free online resource it is today.

All I know is that, from time to time, someone sends me a link or I read about an incredible speaker and I'm rarely disappointed if I click through and listen. I've watched some several times, something I'm normally loathe to do with other media. Jill Bolte Taylor's "Stroke of Insight" talk comes to mind, as does chef Jamie Oliver's mission to change kids' relationship to the foods they eat.

So take a look. And if you're in the business of creating advertising, how about taking a crack at Anderson's challenge: "We want to encourage development of ads-with-a-difference. Ads that engage our audience authentically, intelligently, delightfully. Ads that people will want to share because, like the rest of TED, they encapsulate ideas worth spreading."

We'll all be the better for a more effective way of engaging consumers online than the current models.