Jonathan et al,
Though it doesn't go nearly far enough (for me), this is a good article, thanks for posting! What I generally tell business people I talk with is that the old saw - 50% of my ad budget is wasted, but I don't know which 50% - has been replaced by 98% of my online ad budget has been wasted, but...I don't know what else to do!
Since I come from a traditional ad background (ran an agency in the 90s) and I'm currently building a "request and connect engine" -
trovi.co - I talk a lot with business people about search, SEO, SEM, web advertising in general, and what they get out of it. And I keep trying to find simpler ways to try to explain how the unfortunate decision, way back when, to choose advertising as the fundamental monetization model of the web (especially advertising that follows old demographic and past decision/preference targeting models coupled with essentially broadcast distribution) has been disastrous to the basic functioning of search, the incessant clutter on the web - not to mention the "surveillance marketing state". That's a lot of woe on one bad choice, but it's warranted.
Long long ago in the bad old days of direct mail advertising, I asked a basic question - when is junk mail not junk mail? We all know that 99.9% of the crap that showed up in our mailboxes (now our email boxes) - "targeted" though it was - never made it past the trash can on the way back to the house. All the targeting in the universe based on past actions/preferences cannot tell a marketer the one thing they actually need to know: who wants to buy what I sell now? Or what we call intent. But every now and then, by luck, we get in our mailbox a special deal on the very thing we wanted to buy anyway - and that is the moment that junk mail is not junk mail. The web was - and is - the perfect platform to make this happen all the time, but to create that we had to give up a lot of cherished notions - and many of these notions go far beyond the surface ones of whether a particular advertising model "works" or not. (That's actually an existential question whose answer must take in the effects on the planet and society in which advertising takes place.) The most cherished notion is that companies have the right to coerce people into anything - whether they have the right to invade the commons (thought - mind - is a commons) with incessant coercive messaging at all.
The web could have easily chosen a different model. Search could have been divided into several subsets, one of which would be commerce. (The non-commerce web search model would benefit vastly from the divorce, but that's too long of a topic for right now...) The commerce search model could have been search turned on its head - a customer-power request model, contextualized by customer preferences: e.g. what, where, when, price range, new/used, etc. The search results would be the object, service, event requested - the web is ideally suited to this non-coercive model. And commerce should pay to be found under such exacting criteria. In a single blow, tracking and advertising are wiped out. There is even, as members of this group discuss a lot, a form of "marketing" within this model, but it is permission-based. With trovi, for instance, we will provide member vendors with anonymous "location, time and intent - based active-seeker data" that they can use to send specials to members who have given permission - and even then they cannot send them directly, unless members set up a trusted relationship with a particular vendor. That same anoymous data can tell local vendors what to stock, local services what to provide, and even local entrepreneurs (including makers and crafters) what to produce - all making local biz work better. It's no longer coercion when someone who wants to go bowling on Saturday morning gives permission for a bowling alley to send them a deal.
My thoughts on advertising have obviously changed a great deal since I promulgated it on the world - I now view it as the "desire-inculcation" department of the treadmill of production (see: treadmill of production theory) that the earth can no longer afford and that turns living human beings into consumers and data. Simply put, we can no longer afford the coercive model. Communities, people, small businesses, societies, and the planet, do better when people can find most of what they need locally. Current search, which has sold to the highest bidders - and which is, therefore, de facto advertising) fails them utterly in this sphere. (If I want new blue suede boots today within ten miles of me for $XX, what can it matter
to me that I get a billion search results in a fraction of a second? That's an admission of failure - I just want blue boots.) Advertising is not only not what's needed - it screws up the possibility of good search. What's needed is a model that allows local people (local can be a tourist) to request and connect to what they need nearby. That model is non-coercive. And it has no junk mail. So now, as a business, roughly 100% of your "request fulfillment" budget is good.