And not in the creepy HAL2000 kind of way.
I was searching for info on Net Neutrality, wrapping my head around it, and found this bit from G4's Attack of the Show on Hulu. Next clip on the channel was on Bluetooth headsets, and it was presented by Dungeons and Dragons. Which was a bit of a wow for me.
I've been clear on this, but let me restate that I am not categorically against advertising because advertising, properly done, is content. Consider the copy of The Productive Programmer on my desk right now. The last page before the back cover is an ad that says you can read this book online for 45 days at Safari Online. If you're reading a book called The Productive Programmer, you're more than likely a programmer. Which means you deal with computers a lot. Reading this book online will make sense to you, as you read much online. It's as much content to you as the book's suggestions for Desktop shortcuts. This doesn't mean that you, as the programmer reading this book, will jump up and start reading online any more than it means that you will immediately pick up Virtual Desktop Manager to get virtual desktops on your XP dev box. But it'll be something at least interesting to you.
However, if the back-of-the-book ad was Chanel #5 or Audis or Levi's jeans, it would be far less clear that there's a connection between the audience and the advertisement. This is where mass-market media starts to fall apart. They make a statistical model of their audience, or who they want their audience to be, and advertisers who want to sell to that audience buy ads. If you are not in that statistical model, or the statistical model is too general, the ads will not speak to you.
I haven't been an RPG gamer in two decades. D&D is not going to sell me, but it seems a more natural fit to the G4 audience than cars.
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