I love the new MySpace redesign.  It’s a great step at bridging the impact and engagement gap between online and TV/print advertising.  Good ads can be cool, beautiful, funny.  People will talk about quality commercials and share them as if they were content.

Think Superbowl ads, or VOGUE magazine—which is literally a book full of more ads than content (and you still PAY a subscription fee for it…)  Why are they more compelling?  Because they can capture the entirety of one’s attention, fill the screen/page and leave a bigger impression.

The cleaner, the more functional your design, the more “attention surplus” you can donate to advertisers

Impressions as a metric is a best-effort proxy for something else: attention.  Publishers are really in the business of attracting the attention of their audiences via good content, and then siphoning a portion of that off to advertisers.  There’s ratio between how much attention is lent to content vs advertising, and a very zero-sum way to think about it is that there’s a direct trade off between value to audience vs value to advertisers.  But there’s actually a way you can create attention, or make more efficient use of it.  Bad design is a cognitive sink: attention is wasted by users just trying to understand the mess in front of them.  Good design creates this attention surplus, so that impressions don’t really become more numerous, but bigger.

Now sales-advertisers won’t give a shit.  They’ll say “well if the impression is better, via vs design or targetting we’ll notice the improvement in conversion, and thus ROI.”  But brand-advertisers can not and do not track that.  I know, it sounds like a hazy touchy-feely thing.  But advertising is both a science (relevance) and an art (impact), and the art may have been overlooked by the nerdy culture of silicon valley.

Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is a great design (and still improving).  There’s a ton of attention surplus created by the clean design, but I hope it’s not a matter of principle or smug that they choose not to monetize it.