Raw

For a while now I've felt advertising in its traditional form is pretty inappropriate for the Web, (and it follows that it's not a long-term sustainable business model for services/sites). But it's an intuition I haven't really thought through. Basically it's best for both product/service vendor and potential customer that there's accurate matchmaking between the two, and that's a knowledge engineering issue. Even GoogleAds-style contextual marketing is much closer to spam than delivery of desirable information. Imagine if someone came up to you in a restaurant and said "I overheard you talking about puppies - wanna buy some dogfood?"

But it seems Cluetrain neomarketing guru Doc Searls has been thinking along similar lines, and offers a moderately concrete picture of a big step on the way to spamless markets, something you might call pull selling (or...er...buying..?):

We need to serve market (not marketing) relationships that arise from decisions customers have already made to buy something. They have money in hand, and the intention to book a hotel, rent a car, buy a basketball backboard. Whatever they want, marketing's job is done. Sales needs to show up now. But how? That's the question. And the answers that work can't come from the sell side. We need new means to the buyer's ends, coming from the buyer's side.

We most certainly have the technology for this kind of thing. But there's bound to be plenty of resistance and not-getting-it, at least without some good first-mover services as role models flashing their dollars. A while ago I had a go at Jason Calacanis & co. about the way they were putting ads in feeds. I don't have a problem with ads in feeds per se, but they way they'd done it was to jam the commercial material in with the regular content. My suggestion was to use separate (RSS/Atom) elements for the ads, or at least separate, *identifiable* entries. One of the responses was "we're not assisting readers in blocking ads". But that's exactly a capability they should have provided, along with decent machine-readable categorization/description of the ads. Let the reader decide, the ads were strippable anyhow, only they couldn't be used to add value to the information. I spent ages earlier (mouse-only) trying to find a local seller of iBook keyboards in the end I mailed Henry who knew of a place since his laptop broke while he was over here. 



(Incidentally, I'm also grateful for Doc suggesting markets as relationships, rather than conversations, the latter being just a wee bit too much like Californian Capitalist New Age mumbo jumbo for me).