I think it’s hard to over emphasize the importance of this thought from John Hagel:

The basic paradox of the Internet can be framed very simply: The very platform that makes advertising both more relevant and more measurable is the same platform that longer-term will challenge and ultimately undermine the basic role of advertising in communicating with customers. Link.

Or another way to say it is that advertising as we have known it has blossomed on the Internet, as a result of the Internet, but it will be a short bloom. The petals are already falling.

No one, of course, wants to hear that, certainly not companies, big and small alike, that are banking on a rich paid placement marketscape.

Let’s all snap out of it. There’s no loss here.

Wouldn’t we rather design/build businesses that people are drawn to and, who then, by choice, give us a little bit of themselves, eventually doing their part to build the service or product? There is no better customer than that.

I can’t get enough of Tumblr. Who says attention is scarce? . . . it’s scarce until you find something you’ve been looking for, then it’s abundant. It’s not linear.

If that’s what we’re up to – creating stuff that produces attention out of thin air – then it’s not particularly difficult to think about marketing (“rich, serendipitous environments,” says Hagel) and also ads along those lines, too.

It’s all so utterly simple and right in front of our face that any good Zen master would almost stop speaking altogether. He’d bang the point of his stick on the floor and roar at his students “communicate!”

The problem is that, on the whole, we’re holding on to dear life to what we know, ’cause communicating with new ads and new marketing is going to take some creativity to go along with those new analytical skills everyone is polishing up on.

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