

Y Combinator Taps Into Its Alumni Network, Announces Ad Innovation Conference - hydrazine
http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/22/y-combinator-taps-into-its-alumni-network-announces-ad-innovation-conference/

======
blhack
Oh wow ads would be a fun project to hack on.

How do you gain traction in that, though? There seems like a _huge_ barrier to
entry. I don't suppose adbrite or google like hiring college dropout python
hackers, do they? :(

Something I'd love to see in ads is the ability to give feedback on them.

I _like_ advertisements. One of the things I'll do if there is a new industry
that I want to learn about is pickup trade magazines and read all of the ads.
My brain has gotten good at filtering out the marketing fluff, so the ads end
up being a good piece of information to use.

Unfortunately, online ads seem to be taking a bit of a shotgun approach. I'm
never, ever going to be buying weightloss pills online, and I wish there was a
way of letting content creators know this.

I'm also never, ever going to buy anything with a talking ad, or a popover ad.

But little boxes with a picture and some text? I'll look at those all day.
There is still an ad I saw on slashdot 4-5 years ago that I remember, and have
actually tried to find again because the information on it was valuable to me.

It said something along the lines of "colo that box under your desk". It was
clever, because I had a box under my desk, and I would have liked to have
colo'd it.

If I could see ads for stuff like that all day, I'd probably buy things from
them.

If I'm completely honest, I'd probably even willfully give an ad network
information about myself so that they could serve me more relevant ads. Make
the relationship a mutually beneficial one.

I live in Phoenix. There are a number of bars that I go to pretty frequently,
and there are a number of areas of the city that I like going to. Tell me
about concerts happening in those areas, or drink specials at those bars.

There are certain genres of movies that I like, tell me when they're coming
out, and take me to a place where I can buy tickets to them.

I like DIY electronics stuff. If sparkfun is having some EL wire on sale, I'd
love to know about it.

Pandora for ads, I guess. I'd love that.

~~~
sanswork
Advertising is a fun problem space to work in. Huge amounts of traffic and
data to process. Doing user prediction. All sorts of neat stuff. There are
also a lot of smaller companies out there looking for good developers all the
time. Get to know the industry and don't limit yourself to the top 5 and you
can get in easy.

Stuff like profiles on users a lot of companies already do we also do stuff
like predict based on numerous factors how likely you are to convert on
different products. All this without you filling out a form.

Local ads are interesting but more work in selling. As for stuff like
weightloss pills the reason you see so much of these is because very few sites
can fill their full inventory with relevant paying advertisers so they put
whatever they can in the spaces and keep their fingers crossed. The more
profiling you do the less likely you are to find relevant advertisers.

------
johnwatson11218
One idea that I would like to see in ads is the ability for me to fill out
some kind of portable profile that ads could use to figure out what to show
me. For example if I'm thinking of buying a car it would be nice to only see
car ads for a while. Also the ability to blacklist certain kinds of products.
Maybe the end users could decide how much info to divulge that would effect
their rates in terms of how many ads are required to pay for content.

~~~
jasonwilk
You can do this on Google already: <http://bit.ly/mWaKBy>

~~~
johnwatson11218
sure but I want my television and radio ads to be changed in real time, google
is just a small slice of what I do in a day.

~~~
LiveTheDream
Can't imagine this ever working with radio, but with smart TVs the technology
is absolutely possible.

