If you’re a frequent Mad Men watcher, I wonder if you’ve started to notice the strange phenomenon I’m noticing.  The ads, you know those “annoying” commercials, are getting a hell of a lot better.  When Mad Men first launched the commercials were your run of the mill, everyday ads.  In short, they were boring, expected and lacking soul. Even the BMW ads (and you know I’m a huge BMW fan) were nothing to tune in for.  But, as Mad Men has taken off we’re seeing advertisers up their game.  The content in Mad Men is so good, advertisers are having to make their ads better.

This is a win-win for the user.  Commercials are simply part of a TV viewing experience.  Yes, even if you have Tivo, they are part of the experience, because you have to skip them.  But, when the ads become enjoyable, entertaining, riveting and immersive, the user almost doesn’t mind watching them…almost.

Not unlike TV Shows mailing it in for an entire quarter, until just before sweeps week or an awards cut-off date, we’ve grown accustomed to ads being horrendous all year, until the Super Bowl.  That’s the one time when marketers and advertisers and clients and agencies come together to create ads that are interesting, emotional, fun and more importantly, worth hunting for on USA Today or YouTube, to watch again.  I’ve long lamented that marketers and advertisers should treat every day like it was the Super Bowl, bring their A game and never mail it in.  But, let’s be honest, that just doesn’t happen with the exception of a few brands (eg Nike and Apple).  It’s fun to see marketers and advertisers alike acting like Jr. Art Directors fawning for the approval of Don Draper.

Am I the only one noticing this?

Tools on the internet continue to get smarter. Pandora Radio is one of my favorite examples. It serves up music based on the music I like and the music I don’t like. They do this in a real simple fashion. When a song comes on I can elect to click either a Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down icon. Simple, right?

Based on that feedback, Pandora optimizes my playlist. Pandora gets smarter with each piece of information I supply it. This isn’t exactly revolutionary right? Tivo, Amazon, and Netflix have been leveraging this type of approach for years now. Heck, even Facebook let’s you do that to the ads that are served. Yes, you can thumbs up or down an ad. Based on that information Facebook is supposed to get smarter and no longer show you an ad you clearly aren’t interested in.

This brings me to twitter. As you know I’ve been a big fan of implementing a rating system for twitter for a while now. When twitter was a kiddie pool this feature was a nice to have. But, now that twitter has become an ocean it’s a must have. Imagine being able to thumbs up or down a tweet and having twitter get smarter based on that feedback. Twitter could recommend new people to follow based the feedback and even filter out people from your stream.

To me, that’s value. Much like NetFlix you could compare rankings with your friends/colleagues and let their feedback influence the recommendations. That’s social media at its best right there. What would be even better is if twitter aggregated all the feedback across their membership base to score tweeters. Think about it. No longer would you have to simply look at the number of followers someone has a means of evaluating their value. The community would be able to influence and determine their value. On some level the community would be similar to deputies policing the twitterverse.

Of course not all of this would be free. Twitter after all needs to make some money. From a monetization standpoint, twitter could sell back the information from the community to individuals. Wouldn’t you like to know the raw numbers? If you care about your brand (personal or corporate) you should.

I have a sneaking suspicion as to why they won’t implement this feature, but that’s a whole other post.

Am I crazy? Let me know what you think.