Nothing Ever Happens

Dear readers, I really wanted to do this piece before I leave you for my summer retreat with my family to Silba paradise tomorrow. It’s a quick post .. will put in more when I’m back cause this is something really important, a revolution in front of our doors. It’s the start of the end of traditional media and advertising.
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The advertising business - advertiser message reaching target audience through media - is all about intermediaries. New business models are emerging online and offline usually adding just another intermediary layer, lowering transparency and introducing more inefficiencies on the market with increased ad prices ultimately bringing more and blunter advertisements to the user.

Mass media, media sales houses, media buying agencies, networks, brokers, ad exchanges etc. they all represent steps in an advertisers message to reach its target customer.

A few recent innovations have successfully bypassed established media handling processes, most unquestionably Google and eBay, enabling advertisers to reach target users directly, almost. Google users trade personal information, that Google sells to advertisers in the form of targeted ads, in return for free usage of Google’s services.

The next major shift in advertising will come from technologies and standards which will enable consumers and advertisers to connect directly, skipping media and intermediaries entirely.

A few recent initiatives claim that the personal information contained in users’s click trails, online mails, personal profiles etc. is something a user shall be able to take hold of and sell himself, generating a direct payback.

Advertisers will pay users who have expressed their interest in the advertisers’ relevant product category for seeing their ads, directly. No more media, no more advertising intermediaries. No more guessing and no more targeting, but an equal trade of information.

Here are a few important and exciting things to read:

Attention Economy: an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity. A good overview by Read/Write Web.

APML: attention profiling mark-up language.

AttentionTrust: a not-for-profit organization that puts the user in control of their attention data.

GestureBank and Affinity Services: a collection of individual Internet user activity that has been stripped of all personal identification and aggregated into a central pool of anonymous behavior, all under the control of the users.

Algoco: a browser plug-in that tracks users’ online activity and then uses this information to allow advertisers to target people with specific interests. Returns 90% of ad revenue, sales commissions and other income to its users. Those who recruit other users get also a cut of the revenue. Claims to have 10m users.

Boxbe: an email service that charges marketers to email its users

And for the brave, enter the Intention Economy.