“Shoot the first anti-advertising ad” is the pitch for a contest sponsored by Adblock Plus, the popular software that whites out Web site advertisements. The winning 30- to 90-second video submission, Adblock Plus says, will receive a prize of class time or video equipment worth $5,000 from a film institute in the Philippines.
The contest, at thecreativechallenge.org, is accepting applications until the end of May and is part of a recent conversion of Adblock Plus into a profit-making company with the aim of making online advertising more useful and pleasant, rather than stamping it out entirely.
While many of its estimated 45 million weekly users may treasure the program for its ability to make advertising seem to disappear from the Internet, the people behind Adblock say they recognize that ads keep many publications going.
“I am not against ads in general,” said Till Faida, a managing director of the project, “but I am just annoyed by the current state of ads. I have worked in online marketing — I just thought ads could be so much better.”
While still receiving donations from users, the project now also negotiates deals with large Web sites that run unobtrusive ads to be “white-listed” and thus not automatically blocked by the program. (A recent deal, whose financial terms were not disclosed, granted such status to the social news site Reddit.)
The contest, Mr. Faida said, represented an attempt to build out the community of Adblock Plus users. “We are getting more and more designers involved,” he said, stressing that contributions to the project should come from more than just computer programmers.
Considering his own nuanced view of online advertising, Mr. Faida in a telephone interview said that the contest perhaps should not have so clearly been pitched as “anti-advertising.”
“Maybe we should have had a native speaker reading behind us,” said Mr. Faida, who lives in Cologne, Germany.
A version of this article appeared in print on 04/08/2013, on page B4 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Contest Seeks to Honor Anti-Advertising Ads.
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/contest-seeks-to-honor-anti-advertising-ads/?partner=rss&emc=rss