Programming will be structured according to one question. What does the customer want? The answer might be infomercials, classifieds, continuing education, couponing or even buying life insurance (with the cable company getting the commission) … And we will be in the telephone business.
Today, General Electric, General Motors, Colgate-Palmolive and PepsiCo are probably contemplating dull, wonky Prodigy chat zones and World Wide Web home pages where consumers can download product ingredients, annual reports, and bitmaps from ad campaigns. But advertising works by sneaking your commercial into a show your target market is watching … Online advertising needs a 21st-century Uncle Miltie who can captivate the wired masses with amusing shtick while shamelessly hyping the sponsor who paid for it all. Adam Curry, meet Jack Benny.
Mass marketers actually think they’re going to stuff the Internet full of all this wonderful content, which is supposed to represent the future of advertising, media, communications, and human interaction all rolled into one cute little branded icon … Online services aren’t about information, they’re about entertainment … Marketers should get back to their TV roots … The advertisers who will get rich by brilliantly exploiting online services won’t do it by feeding us specs, brochures, and blatantly bad propaganda, but by being sponsors. Let artists create content. Smart advertisers will make it big by sponsoring the digital equivalent of the “The Milton Berle Show” (aka “The Texaco Star Theater”).
In the one-to-one future … successful advertisers will have to stop their frenetic shouting at customers, and will instead offer polite invitations … There will indeed be a booming market for advertising-on-demand. Consumers will look up advertising whenever they wish to begin thinking about buying something, or when they want to compare prices, features, or services … As customers opt out of traditional shotgun advertising (why? because they can), advertisers will, more and more, include brand messages as integral parts of entertainment and information programs.
Interactivity may mean the end of those obnoxious television spots that seem designed to irritate viewers into remembering the products. “Ring around the collar” and “Aetna, I’m glad I met ya” are doomed. Good riddance.
The rapidly declining effectiveness of mass media, coupled with the rise of addressable, interactive media – one-to-one media – makes one-to-one marketing necessary for any competitor to survive and prosper in the Interactive Age. The new rules of engagement governing business competition will focus on customer share rather than market share.
In an era of targeted marketing, might not the human genome be the best database of all? … The real future of advertising and marketing may rest in the new ecology and the interrelationship between genes and memes … What are the memes that urge us to purchase and consume? How do you splice two or three seemingly disparate memes? What is the appropriate medium to transmit certain memes? VCR? TV? CD? Radio? Do some cultures diffuse advertising memes more efficiently than others? These are the kinds of questions that the meme paradigm will force advertising agencies and their clients to address explicitly. Forget demographics and psychographics. Think memegraphics.
Are ads destined to be little more than the shards of targeted databases mating with personal agents and ingenious viruses infecting the Net? More likely … advertisements will feel and play like visual conversations, video games, and simulations … So, the focus of advertising design shifts: Ads become a medium of collaboration between potential buyer and potential seller. Indeed, if the interaction and information is crafted appropriately, even the term “advertisement” becomes passe, replaced by a new genre of commercial communication.
The rise of smart networks and programmable agents/filters means that advertisements will become more targeted and selective. Databases will drive many ads over the Net, with smart databases responding to queries by curious consumers. Advertisers and buyers will negotiate for information over the Net.
A … system would be technically capable of offering its customers not just pay-per-view but TV-sans-ads. How many viewers would be willing to pay their local cable system an extra five or ten bucks each month not to see any advertisements? … Subscribers could program what kind of ads they wanted to receive … and screen out the ones they didn’t … Needless to say, a media distribution company could charge advertisers a pretty penny to identify the households that wanted to see their offerings. As telephone and cable companies merge and smarten up their networks, they inevitably become powerbroker intermediaries between the advertisers and the viewers. They become the royal gateways for the next generation of advertising.