I’ve been thinking about public service announcements lately – or rather, unpaid ad space devoted to public service announcements. Some AdSense experiments I’ve been running keep popping them up (grrr), and I’ve ran into them tangentially at work. Many ad-serving businesses show unpaid PSAs instead of paid ads when there’s no paid ads to show or when their contextual / behavioral analysis machine stubs its toe on something. That’s a lot of ads, which are presumably generating a lot of income for a lot of worthy causes. Which is terrific. But how do these PSAs get chosen? Do non-profits know where to go to get their PSAs in the hands of these networks? Are there untapped opportunities for local non-profits to get their PSAs in the pool, taking advantage of ad networks with effective geotargeting? Could single-issue non-profits better take advantage of a behavioral ad business’ demographic information?
This area smells under-served. Any enterprising online ad executive with a little free time could do a lot of good by setting up a service to educate non-profits, collect their PSAs, and distribute them to online ad businesses and individual publishers. Hell, this could even be a for-profit opportunity, if the non-profits put conversion pixels on their online solicitations – the non-profit gets a cut, the service gets a cut, and the ad network accepting the PSA gets a cut. (That’d be a shame, since the non-profits would get a smaller percentage of funds raised – but God knows there’s enough exploitative paid solicitation firms offline…)
