• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, March 7, 2005

NEW ORLEANS - Describing how new technologies are making media cheaper, smarter and far more pervasive than ever before, a top media regulator Friday said the biggest obstacle facing Madison Avenue wasn't the technology itself, but how "annoying" the ad industry is becoming. "Your challenge is to stop being annoying," Edmond J. Thomas, chief of technology at the Federal Communications Commission, told attendees during Friday morning's session of the American Association of Advertising Agencies media conference here.

Citing how advertising clutter is growing to new, obnoxious proportions, including up to 30-minutes of unabated commercials in some television instances, Thomas said, "You're almost forcing regulators to get involved."

However, he said the government would ultimately prefer that consumers regulate themselves and noted how new technological developments would give them the supreme power to do so.

Ticking off a progression that is making both broadband access and mass storage cheap and ubiquitous, Thomas said a new generation of "artificial intelligence" software has already been created and would be cheap enough to be installed in most consumer households within three or four years, making it possible for household electronics to automatically bypass advertising altogether.

He also disclosed findings of an Ernst & Young survey of American executives who said they believed 2 percent of all ads were being skipped in 2003 and projected that would rise to 12 percent of all ads by 2005.

"That's a very important statistic," said Thomas, adding that there also was some upside to some of the new media technologies, particularly prospects for broadband telecommunications services distributed over electrical power lines, a technology that was recently approved by the FCC.

"When and if that goes in, it allows data providers when and where there is an electrical pole," explained Thomas, adding, "Anything that consumes electricity can have an idea."

The implications of that technology, he said, could be both an opportunity and a risk for marketers. On the upside, he said an electrical device like a refrigerator could report when it had "shortages" to the consumer or to a marketer.

Ultimately, he said, the ad annoyance factor would become even more important in such an environment: "I think that's the biggest risk you have, especially if you start being annoying with the new technologies."

Ironically, marketers and agencies foresee themselves growing more annoying, net less so in the near term. At least that was the takeaway from a panel discussion on product integration and branded content that came after Thomas' comments.

"It's time to make mistakes. It's time to go out and find out what the annoyance factor is," said Mark Kaline, head of media at Ford Motor Co., warning, "The consumer is going to see more and more of this."

"Talk about annoyance. What's gong to happen when you start to integrate content into games?," echoed Marc Goldstein, CEO of MindShare, referring to the hot trend toward advergamng, or placing advertising or branded content messages into video games.