Marketing’s last mile and the Prosumer’s revenge

On July 8th, the Wall Street Journal ran a story on Targeted Ads and focused on NebuAd and Phorm. There is a good summary write up with links to the history of telcos relationship with these vendors located here:

Senate hearing on NebuAd, privacy set for tomorrow

Cable companies and telcos say they need software like NebuAd-and it’s British comrade-in-arms, Phorm-to help them develop targeted advertising for subgroups of Internet and television service users. The ad dollars, they say, are critical to their growth. Check out this Wall Street Journal story for a different look at the controversy. — Jim O’Neill

These technologies are being called into question by Congress due to the fact that it can be interpreted as wiretapping.  Cookies, Adware, Spyware, etc. have always bothered me and its amazing how much latitude these technologies and those that develop it have had over the years. This all seems symptomatic of a larger problem these days. Going back to my theme of “too much of anything isn’t good”, there is an enormous amount of product out there looking to be marketed to large audiences in the hopes that it becomes mainstream or at the very least just captures a bit of the long tail.

Just last year, as Ray Ozzie was helping Microsoft redefine their strategy going forward they announced that they would be getting heavy into the advertising game:

“Microsoft is rapidly trying to build up their advertising infrastructure and also give a way for companies to build commercial products with it,” said Jupiter Research analyst David Card. “The twist here is you could pay or dive into their marketplace and let them sell ads for you and use the revenue sharing to pay for the technology licensing.”   — http://news.cnet.com/2100-1012_3-6179901.html?hhTest

I remember thinking - that’s the best you can do for a new business model is ads??

It was an interesting acknowledgment that there are only minor innovations left to be made to the business software landscape for the worldwide e-commerce infrastructure to be complete. And if it is almost in place then we might as well get on with the act of selling stuff.

Here’s where we go back to the future… Alvin Toffler laid out a premise of our civilization going through 3 major waves. The first was the rise of agrarian society that allowed people to settle into a place and the second one was kicked off by the Industrial revolution. The third wave is where we are today in the information age. This last age is also marked by the rise of the “prosumer” in his words. His prediction of the combined producer and consumer turned out to be spot-on and this was well before ebay or the Internet.

He also saw the development of the worldwide infrastructure for commerce slowly reaching its completion. In reality, all the planes, trains, trucks, ports, factories, etc. are in place and he predicted that we would spend less time building that out and truly leveraging it (this is back in 1980). The Internet has enabled the marketing function to finally match the scale of the commerce infrastructure that is in place. The bigger question is…what do you do when the marketing function has finally matured and you can send the perfect message to those that are most likely to buy from you?

Aside from the fact that the “noise” level will go way down…My guess is that the “prosumer” can finally define for themselves what their true economic value is in society by their contribution. Then we can just post how much money we made today instead of how many hits, trackbacks, friends or click throughs. I highly recommend Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave and if someone had handed me the book in high school, I would be a very rich man right now. I didn’t see it until 1999. Check out his latest book, Revolutionary Wealth as well as his website.

Tags: adware, alvin toffler, ecommerce, Marketing, nebuad, phorm, third wave