The idea of an intelligent agent that can whisk away our tedious work is incredibly seductive. But it is also a dangerous idea to promote. In the 1980s, many database companies discovered that promoting a “natural-language interface” is the kiss of death because customers then expect too much. To connect your product with “intelligent agents” risks far greater customer disappointment.
A “Decentral” Intelligence Agency … provides a way to master the flood of multimedia, multilingual, multichannel information collected, analyzed, and disseminated by millions of autonomous sources each day … the federal government must empower all of its people to gain access to the kind of distributed intelligence that is impossible to create within a single “Central” Intelligence Agency. The supporting elements of this new vision include connectivity, content, and coordination, among others. Connectivity is well along, because it is a tangible “thing” that most bureaucrats and private-sector profiteers can understand … We citizens must instruct our government in the basic truths of the Age of Information.
VR is extremely useful in scientific visualization and entertainment, and will be very significant for those niches. But as a tool for productively changing everyone’s relationship to computation, it has two crucial flaws. First, at the present time [1992], and probably for decades, it cannot produce a simulation of significant verisimilitude at reasonable cost. That means that users will not be fooled and the computer will not be out of the way. Second, and most importantly, it has the goal of fooling the user – of leaving the everyday physical world behind. This is at odds with the goal of better integrating the computer into human activities, since humans are of and in the everyday world.
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.