Saturday September 24, 2005

Strangers with Candy

Over at Stay Free!, friend of Hanasiana Carrie McLaren takes on the business model of Adcandy.com and its “open source” pretensions. Adcandy, which just got a largely uncritical hug from Wired News, plans to solicit advertising ideas from consumers and charge companies for access to them—whether it be for creative or market research purposes. Carrie is right to point out that calling this “open source” is quite a stretch, and Wired should have known better than to fall for it. I would only add this: Adcandy’s business model will not work.

As Carrie says, “there is no indication that the masses gives two twigs about Adcandy,” but the only people who might care less are advertisers. We’ve been down this road before, and recent history is strewn with sites that have tried to bring together online focus groups and deliver them to marketers, only to find out that, um, yeah, thanks, they’ve got the consumer insight thing taken care of. It’s what they do for a living!

The original AdCritic was based, in part, on this flawed model, and who can forget Ads.com? (You can buy the domain if you want it.) You forgot it? Here’s a refresher:

Ads.com has gone belly up. … Founded by former RealNetworks executive John Atcheson, Ads.com planned to make money by charging corporations to list their Web sites next to the commercials and by reselling consumer information.

Adcandy might build it, but they won’t come.