One thing I’d like to see come out of this financial crisis, and economic slowdown, whether it be two or five or ten years, is the “creative destruction” of much of online advertising.

It flat out doesn’t work the way it needs to (display, not search), but because everyone knows that eventually there will be so many dollars focused on digital (. . . call it 15% of all ad dollars in the US within three years), there is a rush to dominate that “space” . . . with, something. And that leads to pork bellies.

All the analysts say it’s about scale. Well, right, it’s the Internet, so it always is. But that doesn’t mean you have to start at scale, and it certainly doesn’t mean the ads that are served up have to be exactly the opposite, as they consistently are, of what people want.

What an economic downturn should highlight is that it’s not people moving away from digital ads – that was never the problem; they were always resisting, rejecting, and denying them – it’s that advertisers are pulling back because there is no true data to support the investment.

Yes, I’d like to see how David Rosenblatt at DoubleClick does display, too. Maybe they’re going to nail it.

But if they do, they’ll have to acknowledge that the value of an ad increases dramatically when

• it shows up on a site/blog/device I already trust and think is cool
• it has a real voice that matches the content on that page
• it allows me to express my voice through it (click, click)

You hear constantly about the magic of targeting users with the right ad. Great, work on it . . . incrementally. We’ll enjoy it along with the rest of the singularity.

But I’d much rather just discover great ads from cool companies on sites I trust that let me participate. Do that, and I’ll do the work of targeting them myself.

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