Owning your Mindshare

You throw out junk mail.  You record television and skip through commercials.  You download music and use an iPod rather than listen to the radio.  Your time is valuable, and you want to fill it with things of value.  Unfortunately, more and more advertising has less and less value.  So you filter it out and remove the power of media moguls to force things into your line of view.

You’re restricting access to your mindshare.  We all do it, and with newer technologies, it’s becoming easier to filter out meaningless advertising.  But every once in a while, you might actually benefit from that advertising.  You might learn about a new product or service.  You might be tempted to take a vacation.  You might actually increase your life insurance.  The thing is, you are the only person who knows whether or not that commercial will be valuable to you.  Marketers like me can only guess.

The other day, I was introduced to a website called MyMindshare.  It’s a fantastic new approach to advertising that rewards you for paying attention to an ad.

Typically, advertisers pay millions of dollars to media types.  These media types then flood your favorite channels (newspapers, television, radio, Internet, etcetera) with advertisements.  You either listen to the message or you don’t.  It’s wasteful, time consuming, and utterly disrespectful of you, the consumer.

MyMindshare’s model is different.  Advertisers pay you to browse their website or other advertisement for 20 seconds.  If you like what they’re selling, you can dig deeper.  If you don’t, you still get paid.  No middle man, and no third party dictating which ads you view and which ads you don’t.

It’s still starting to take off, but I recommend everyone take a look at MyMindshare to see what it’s like.  It has the potential to change the way we think about advertising – which I think is incredible!