AdReady misses the opportunity to create an ad marketplace

News from TechCrunch today that a new ad solutions start-up, AdReady, has missed a trick by offering everyone the tools to create professional-looking display ads. What trick? Well...currently people can go to AdReady to create a display campaign, and use its data on the historical performance of various creative formats to choose the best ad for the job.

Nick Gonzalez comments at TechCrunch that "I imagine an extreme reliance on the data will produce a lot of generic advertising", but the missed opportunity is larger than this. It's a shame that people will be using this merely to create generic banner advertising, but the real loss is that there's no opportunity here for people who want eye-catching display ads to connect with people who could design them. (A glance at Amazon's Mechanical turk project shows us the incredible cost-effectiveness that it's possible to tap by opening up "human intelligence tasks" to a competitive marketplace.) As Robert Young once said of social networking tools,

"Think of this way… what if “American Idol” had been produced solely by the capabilities of the contestants themselves, without the expertise and talent of the show’s producers, directors, writers, etc. As talented and entertaining as the contestants are, the resulting production quality, the level of emotional engagement, viewership/ratings and monetization potential of the full package would likely be far inferior to what we all see on the air today."

Giving people the tools to create their own media can result in extraordinary results, but it has its limitations, and there seems little reason that AdReady (or a solution like it) can't tap a market for design expertise rather than merely hand over the tools for amateur ad creation.

Update: AdReady's marketing guy points out (within a very few hours of the original post going up - these people are on the ball) that there's already an element of this on the site and that "we expect to make the ability to design creative for advertisers through the AdReady system more available over time, as I absolutely agree that the collective ideas and talent of designers around the world is not something that any single company could hope to match." So perhaps AdReady will become a creatives marketplace, which is where the big prize will be.