“Improving a pain in the ass doesn’t make it a kiss.”

Doc Searls ended a recent post on the folly of yet another guess as to how to get online advertising to work with those words. A succinct yet accurate observation such as I’ve come to expect from the Doc since first encountering his thinking while reading the The Cluetrain Manifesto back in 2001.

He is commenting on a recent idea called ‘SmartAds‘ which plans to slap advertising space into ‘blank’ spaces of online video. Coming from New Zealand where we are exposed to one of the highest rates of advertising messages in the world*, I’m really hoping that this is not going to take off – my brain doesn’t have enough space left for any more non-relevant advertising taking the shotgun approach to product awareness. A kiss this certainly would not be.

*I did read a paper on this somewhere, I just can’t remember the source and Google seems to want to hide it from me this morning 🙁 – Can anyone else find it?