The Crowd Gets into Advertising

Advertising on Peer to Peer (P2P) Networks

Have you ever wondered why the advertising world clings to three major networks, a few hundred cable channels and a handful web sites (e.g., YouTube) to place their ADs when there is a perfectly good crowd out there? Sounds like the proverbial elephant through the eye of a needle, right? After all, peer to peer networks are a perfect expression of crowds banding together to get what they want, resulting in an incredibly powerful medium that is oddly overlooked by mainstream media. According to RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), more than 2 billion songs are illegally swapped every month. You would think traffic like this would draw the attention of major media. Yet still advertisers continually look to, and compete for much smaller audiences in traditional TV & Cable. The reason may lie in the lack of comfort advertisers have with media that got its start with illegal or racy content. If you recall, it was only a few years ago when porn reigned supreme on the Internet. The fact that a "legal" AD might appear next to a pirated movie in the user's P2P search results may be enough to drive the faint hearted away. A few brave companies such as Coke are experimenting in P2P media.

The folks at Jun Group are starting to tap the enormous audience of P2P networks by teaming up with advertisers to legally distribute their content. So, if you are a TV advertiser wondering where your 13-24 year-olds went, look no further than P2P file sharing networks.


Links:

http://www.jungroup.com/phd/lebron.html
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