Empire Avenue: An Introduction?

By now it should be obvious that when we talk about "revolutionizing online advertising" with Empire Avenue, we are talking about creating a new advertising network. But unlike other advertising networks, we want to take advantage of the social networking and content creation revolution that is happening on the Internet. The revolution, after all, is about and fuelled by you with your Facebook accounts, Twitter updates, YouTube videos and more. Regular Internet users (no matter what media companies might say to the contrary) are now the primary movers and shakers of the online world. So no surprise that when it comes to advertising, we want you to be the one that benefits. We want you to have and take control. We want you to have fun!

What I will not say in this blog post is exactly how we've managed to do all this. After all, while we are very close to launching this thing, we still want to drive you insane for just a little longer while we get everything ship-shape. But why advertising?

Two reasons: 1) Advertising is important and 2) Advertising is also bloody annoying.

It's one of the weirdest balancing acts of business and society. Without advertising and publicity no one would know about new products, events and more except through our limited day to day conversations. For example, I cannot count the number of times I've gone to see a band due to a well-crafted poster creatively glued onto the side of a derelict building. When most of us hear the word "advertising" we immediately think of big multi-national companies and super-bowl advertising. Instead bring your mind towards the small companies and the small community efforts and events which you participate in made possible by effective and affordable advertising.

Ultimately, advertising is important for our economies and communities to succeed.

Unfortunately advertising is also bloody annoying.

E-mail advertising, for example, has spawned a sub-industry in Spam management. I think I can talk about spam forever. May all spammers find themselves suffering the fleas of a thousand camels. Similarly annoying are the large numbers of web sites that participate in pop-up windows, attempt to block your enjoyment of content by forcing advertising on you or use any number of other underhanded methods to illicit some clicks on advertising I could not care less about. And while the annoyingness of advertising isn't limited to the online world, let's try to solve the world's problems one issue at a time!

So what do we want to do with Empire Avenue? Not only do we want to give you the ability to control advertising, we want you to benefit from the advertising regardless of whether you run the advertising or whether you are the person to whom advertising is targeted. Most of all, we want to make advertising FUN!

I know, it's kind of like saying "we will make root canal surgery fun"!

I should stop here before I spill all the beans. You wouldn't want me to do that would you?