Our media strategies editor argues that relevancy is NOT the antidote to audiences' fatigue with advertising.

The "Waz Up!" Superfriends video that made the rounds before the dotcom bust was entertaining. Remember how it was frequently featured as the quintessential viral advertising experience? Although it featured the Budweiser brand, people enjoyed it because it was entertaining rather than because it was an advertisement.

When I get ads for travel because I've been to Expedia a few times in the last couple of weeks, I admittedly pay more attention to them. But I don't feel terribly warm about the ads.

The advertising industry at large (online and offline, if they both need to be called out as separate entities) has for the last number of years looked to the increased opportunity for relevancy as the way to get more attention for ads and getting greater response from audiences because of that relevancy.

Behavioral, contextual, declarative data used for targeting… these have all been proffered as solutions to the waning interests on the part of audiences in advertising and the waxing interests in advertisers' need to see greater yield from their ad spend.

In a recent interview, Tim Hanlon, the SVP of Ventures at Denuo -- a Publicis company -- said that because audiences are savvier than ever about marketing messages, when messages do get in, it is because an individual's "defenses were down" or because he was "actually interested."

This got me thinking about the whole issue of relevancy. It assumes that there is interest on the part of a consumer for the advertising to which they are paying attention and further assumes that the interest can be taken as an invitation to tell them more about your product or service.

What I realized is that relevancy can be good as a matter of introduction, but it should not be mistaken as interest in the advertising itself. 

Don't get me wrong, as an advertising guy for 12 years now I have vast amounts of interest in advertising and making it work. But people who work in marketing and advertising frequently forget that -- quite simply -- most people don't like advertising.

There is a kind of social contract audiences have, unconsciously for the most part, with the media they consume. I get the content I want and, in exchange, there are advertisements that come as part of the experience (or interrupt the experience). But for generations before and likely generations hence, humans have a relationship with advertising that can best be described as managed hostility, on a good day, tolerance.

When people talk about ads they like what they usually describe is advertising as an artifact of culture-- something funny, like the old Outpost.com ads with the pack of wolves unleashed on a high school marching band; or the current "dropped calls" ads from Cingular. Or, they're talking about something that makes us nostalgic, like "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz" from Alka-Seltzer; or "You Deserve a Break Today" from McDonald's. But no one says how much they love being sold.

Advertising for advertising's sake isn't what people like.

What consumers want is information, not advertising. This is something that Google seems to have figured out, likely by accident. Search isn't successful only because it is relevant. It is successful because it offers information. That information just happens to come to us from an advertiser.

There's such a thing as too much relevance
Another caveat to relevance is growth of market. Too much relevance and an advertiser might miss out on markets, or people in the market, that aren't readily identified.

How do you chance into growing your market if the only people who see your ads are those already interested in your product? What about the guy who doesn't know about your product but might be interested if he did know?

Don't mistake what I'm saying. I think improvements in relevance of advertising and the growing opportunities for consumers to have control over their access to advertising go a long way to mitigate that state of managed hostility most people have towards advertising.

But don't let a focus on relevance and consumer choice narrow the sites so much that you miss the fat ring of potential market that rests just beyond the bull's-eye.

Media Strategies Editor Jim Meskauskas is vice president and director of online media for ICON International, Inc., an Omnicom Company. Read full bio.