Steam

Steam, the digital distribution application by the Valve Corporation, is an evil money spinning wonder. First question: Who the heck likes to view ads? Not me. Would I like seeing Valve ads? Hell yeah!

Now, I've known for some time that Steam is evil. I know this because of the hundreds of games on my Steam account, for example. But what fascinates me the most is how Steam has managed to convince people to like ads. Those in advertising will know that the holy grail is to get peoples' attention, turn that attention to sales and then everything's nice and sunny. Steam does precisely that.

The beauty of a highly specialized distribution system is that everyone getting on it has the same goal: To acquire and play video games. Then comes how their ads are laid out: The top bar has game ads (which everyone expects) and the popup has the highlight game ads. It's easy enough to ignore the unobtrusive top bar ads, and to close the single popup.

Now, how does this differ from the average ad popup? Well for one they tend to show up in ways that prevent you from getting at the product. Youtube ads prevent you from watching a video to get you the advertiser's message. Pron sites spam you with shitloads of popups to the same effect. And everything else has ad bars that show stuff that may or may not be related to what you seek. All in all those just serve to turn eyes away, which translates to lower hits and even lower conversion rates.

Taking a page from Steam and Amazon, it seems that customers react best to very tight ad integration that brings them the information they seek, and in a timely manner. It doesn't obstruct user consumption either. I suppose the next thing is to wonder how one may elegantly advertise on a site that isn't selling stuff...