Subtopic: Advertising/PR

One way for the advertisers to capture your attention will be to offer a small amount of money Ð a nickel or a dollar, perhaps Ð if you will look at an ad. When you have watched it, or as youÕre interacting with it, your electronic account gets credited and the advertiserÕs electronic account is debited. In effect, some of the billions of dollars now spent annually on media advertising, and on the printing and postage of direct-mail advertising will instead be divvied up among consumers who agree to watch or read ads sent directly to them as messages É This may sound a little strange, but it is just another use of the market mechanism for friction-free capitalism. The advertiser decides how much money it is willing to bid for your time, and you decide what your time is worth.

Direct-response advertising on the information highway will come in the form of an interactive multimedia document rather than a piece of paper. Although it wonÕt waste natural resources, there will have to be some way to make sure you donÕt get thousands of these almost-free communications a day.

The information highway will be able to sort consumers according to much finer individual distinctions, and to deliver each to a different stream of advertising. This will benefit all parties: the viewers, because ads will be better tailored to their specific interests, and therefore more interesting; producers and on-line publications, because they will be able to sell advertisers focused blocks of viewers and readers. Advertisers will be able to spend their ad dollars more efficiently. Preference data can be gathered and disseminated without violating anyoneÕs privacy, because the interactive network will be able to use information about consumers to route advertising without revealing which specific households received it. A restaurant chain would know only that a certain number of middle-income families with small children received their ad.

Advertising doesnÕt pay if everyone chooses to skip the by the ad. The highway will offer alternatives. One might be software that lets the customer fast-forward past everything except for the advertising, which will play at normal speed. The highway will possibly offer the viewer the option of asking to see a group of commercials.

Advertising will evolve into a hybrid, combining todayÕs television commercials, magazine ads, and a detailed sales brochure. If an ad catches your attention, youÕll be able to request additional information directly and very easily. Links will let you navigate through whatever information the advertiser has made available, which might be product manuals consisting of video, audio, and text. Vendors will make getting information about their products as simple as possible.