I noticed something interesting over the weekend while watching something on one of the video streaming services, probably Amazon Video (or whatever they call their service). In addition to the regular ads that show up unless you pay an extra fee each month, they had figured out a way to inject advertising into the pause screen. As in, when you pause a video, instead of simply freezing on the frame where you paused, you are presented with an ad. One part of me immediately thought, "Genius!", while another thought, "Ugh, where will they put ads next."

Amazon especially has taken ads to a new level on Amazon Video, at least on the Roku app where we mostly watch. When you are presented with an ad, depending on the content, you are given options to interact with the ad using your remote. For a product, for example, there is a button on the screen you can click to add that item to your Amazon shopping cart. YouTube has also recently rolled out some interesting innovations with regards to ads and how they are presented.

As a child of the 70s and 80s, I am all too familiar with advertising supported content delivery systems. They were called broadcast networks and there were, generally speaking, three of them. We didn't have to pay for the service, and we knew that we would get to see a couple of minutes of commercials every 20 minutes or so. The innovation in TV advertising was not about the Ad Tech, but rather the content of the ad.

No point to any of this really, just sharing some thoughts.

Cheers,