The intent of this eye-tracker video at etre.com was about usability (and the utter uselessness of placing "contextual" advertising was just a bonus discovery). The fact remains though, that no one in the ad insertion game seems to be letting up. The recent BusinessWeek article on click fraud should have been a wake up call to innovate towards a better WOM (word of mouth) solution, but instead, it seems to form groups to babysit the growing problem of click accountability.

When you have billions of dollars worth of turf to protect, you really don’t have the luxury of game changing ideas. Growth is already doing a number on the innovation potential of your organization and now its just about maintainance.

So if ad placements don’t really register, then why keep doing it and why build revenue projections based on them? I think it comes down to the sperm analogy I made sometime back, and it really comes down to the cost of managing that "hit or miss" approach. If the costs are manageable, and we can invent the metrics to prove it (at least for this quarter), so be it!

As for the feeling of somebody tracking me (to push useless ads in my path), here are some things you can do. If that fails, then maybe advertising ourselves with huge banner ads will have the same effect of obscurity as the ad in the Etre example did :)