JLB’s presentation at Demo Day makes my inner ad-nerd excited.

I love advertising. I don’t mean pop-ups, pop-unders, dog-ears, CPU chewing flash banners and all the other menacing forms it has taken in the last decade. I mean great creative campaigns. Old Spice is a popular example from recent times.

The last decade has given cause for concern with advertising’s future. AdWords, the dominant channel for online ads¹, offers a medium perfect for search results but it lacks room for more creative campaigns. Sure, you can put up banners on the Google Content Network, but even Isaiah Mustafa would have suffocated in a 300 x 300px box.

What AdWords lacks as a creative medium it makes up for in relevance. Beyond targeting on broad demographics, psychographics or blanket time-slots, AdWords targets every person on their location, recent conversations, behaviour, social network and much more.

Relevance is wonderfully effective for all parties. The only problem is, Google makes relevance bland.

OnSwipe, which launches tomorrow, is promising to offer an in-media advertising medium that doesn’t suck aesthetically. If they can combine relevance with a great medium for creative, we might see a beautiful new future for advertising.

Don’t believe me? Watch JLB’s presentation at Demo Day for yourself:

¹ I would include Facebook’s ad platform but it has little credibility after showing me only ads in Vietnamese for the last year. I don’t speak Vietnamese, I just happened to be browsing from a Vietnamese IP address.