The question is whether we’ll kill all of advertising, or just some of it.
People have always hated advertising. Sure, not all of it, but plenty of it, and for lots of reasons.
In the online world, it’s not just because advertising is awful in so many more ways than were ever possible in the old print and broadcast worlds. It’s because advertising online can be personal to the Nth degree, thanks to surveillance we don’t want and never asked for.
So we block ads, tracking or both. This is a rational response on the market’s demand side to abuses by market’s supply side. We’re talking Econ 101 here. Not complicated, unless you’re in one of the abusers.
But forget them for now. There’s too much being said about their problems already.
Let’s talk instead about what we’ll valve through, once we have good message plumbing and not just prophylaxis. Specifically, what kind of advertising will we allow, welcome, or perhaps even demand?
Maybe we’ll still want search advertising, such as Google’s AdWords.
Maybe some of us will want notifications of what’s on sale. But is that really advertising, or just another kind of junk mail?
How about plain old brand advertising, like we still get in print publications and on live broadcasts? Possibly, if both sides of the market can agree on what’s good about it.
To find answers, we need to wipe the slate clean. That slate is the Internet, not the Web, which is a layer on top of the Net. So forget browsers and websites.
Start here: the Internet is nothing more than a way (called a protocol) that any two parties, anywhere in the world, can signal each other and interact as directly and simply as possible, at no cost. For interactions of the commercial kind, the Net should be a World Wide Bazaar with no distance between anybody or anything.
We haven’t built that yet. The space is there, but it’s occupied instead by something called e-commerce, which we built out inside the Web. This situation is summed up nicely in Phil Windley’s one-slide History of E-Commerce:
To see how we get a real bazaar on the Net, you need to look at it from the perspective of your own ass.
Let me explain.
Marshall McLuhan says all human tools—from stone hammers to speech, the alphabet, print, radio, TV and everything you can do with a computer—are all extensions of our bodies and minds. For example, a pen is an extension of your hand and your ability to talk and to draw. A car is an extension of your ability to move in the world. There is no irony when you speak of my wheels and my engine because when you drive you are human+, in this case human + car.
Now let’s look at the extensions of our asses called computers and mobile devices. While these things do compute, calling them computers misdirects us away from the main thing we do with them, which is remember stuff. (Maybe we should have called them rememberers.)
We can remember infinitely more with computing than we ever could with our brains alone: the people we know, the appointments on our calendars, the taxes we’ve paid and so on. What we call search is nothing more than adding the sum of Google’s or Bing’s memory to our own.
Now let’s look at the building materials we need to operate at full humanity and efficiency in the World Wide Bazaar the Internet’s founding protocols gave us in the first place.
On the market’s demand side, we need tools to remember useful facts about everything we already own, or might want or need. We also need safe and standard ways to signal our intentions in the open marketplace, and means for engaging with trusted sellers and intermediaries.
On the market’s supply side, we need companies to have the same: ways to remember everything useful about what’s for sale, what’s already sold, who it has sold to, and (with customers’ clear permission) how it’s being used.
Naturally, we can also expect markets to arise for intermediaries on both sides:
These aren’t new drawings. The ProjectVRM community years ago recognized the need to distinguish between third parties working for vendors and those working for customers. We called the latter fourth parties, and describe them here. (Note to lawyers: yes, we know in the legal world the number of parties stop at three, but we do need to make distinctions, so bear with us on this one.)
In addition to the arrangement of players in the graphic above, we ought to have symbols we can use to represent the symbiotic and reciprocal attractions (as with magnets) the two sides have for each other. The magnets in the graphic above are called r-buttons, where the r stands for relate. We explain them here. (And dig this: there are even keyboard characters for them, borrowed from the mathematics palette: ⊂⊃.)
There should be lots of competition on both sides for helping the first to parties out:
Okay, so that’s the future arrangement of players in the completely flat bazaar the Internet supports. Now: where, if anywhere, does advertising fit into that arrangement? In ad-speak, all of programmatic and adtech is on the right side, but now faces limited or absent ability to spy on the left side.
Publishers can operate as fourth parties, on the left side: the readers’ side.
One possibility I see here is brands sponsoring good publishers because readers appreciate a functioning media ecosystem in which ads appear because the advertiser is sponsoring the publisher and not just chasing spied-on eyeballs. This is what Customer Commons is working toward with #NoStalking terms. It’s also what we had in print publishing and commercial broadcasting until the online versions of both got corrupted by the cancer of adtech.
In the last week I’ve had too many conversations to count, with many actual and potential players in this new marketplace, which is tabula rasa so far, with many wide open possibilities. I’ll talk about some of those in upcoming posts.
In the meantine, one clear outcome is what I forecast in The Intention Economy: “When the backlash is over, and the advertising bubble deflates, advertising will remain an enormous and useful business. We will still need advertising to do what only it can do. What will emerge, however, is a market for what advertising can’t do. This new market will be defined by what customers actually want, rather than guesses about it.”
That market is a helluva lot bigger than the one we have now.
Thanks to Hugh MacLeod for the artwork, created long ago for a project we worked on together that was way ahead of its time, which is now.
