You'd think we'd have sorted out our attitude to ads on the net by now, but there's no settlement in sight yet. I'm pretty sure that just putting those two infinitely loaded words "internet" and "advertising" together has got about half of you into the mood for a fight.
I have a book in my study from 1994 called Advertising on the Internet. Reprinted on the back cover are quotes from the hate mail the author received while researching it. From the beginning, when it became apparent that the net could support advertising, parts of the internet community have rejected it outright.
According to Doc Searls and David Weinberger in their new manifesto the big mistake is thinking that "...the Web, like television, is a way to hold eyeballs still while advertisers spray them with messages."
Advertisers are still uncertain. I've spent a lot of the last decade talking to them about the fate of advertising now that we're all connected together. There are two main scenarios. In the first, the Internet liberates us from advertising. The technology creates a kind of sci-fi utopia in which advertising essentially disappears.
In this scenario, we consumers just articulate our needs and desires into the ether and stuff shows up to match them. Persuasion is phased out, with all those other outdated forms of mediation. Manufacturer and consumer enter into a kind of communion, enabled by "mass customisation", two way communication and opt-in marketing. Yuck.
Advertisers fear this scenario most because it neutralises their power to talk to our desiring selves, to get us wanting stuff we'd never dreamt we needed, to fill our houses with Cheestrings, 3-in-1 dishwasher tablets and Barbie poodle parlours.
In the other scenario, the net is translated into advertising heaven (or a grim dystopia, depending on your perspective). There are no secrets, no hiding places and no way to turn the damned thing off. Advertisers harvest data at every node - your shopping habits, favourite web sites, demographic data and shoe size are all available for a fee from the universal marketing database in the sky. Privacy activists and anti-business types hate this one - it seems to promise the final victory of commerce over civilisation. Double yuck.
Neither of these scenarios has actually played out. In fact, the second one, the one the activists feared most likely, has had some nasty set-backs in the last couple of years - not least the dot.com crash and a rising impatience with intrusive marketing techniques. But both versions of the future are simplistic and both fail to take into account some pretty important factors.
They are both premised on the inefficiency and general gnarliness of advertising. The utopians believe that, in their perfect world, ads will be unnecessary. Needs, instead of being manufactured by cynical blood sucking advertisers, will be met by a benign, listening technology, tuning in to our desires and arranging delivery between 8 and 5 weekdays.
The shocking waste of attention, effort and money produced by off-target advertising will be a thing of the past: the ad jingle playing in an empty room, the unopened newspaper's freight of unseen double page spreads, the credit card ad sent to a nine year-old. All history.
The dystopians are less hopeful... and more cynical. Advertisers have always taken wastage for granted - the automatic 50% of your budget thrown away whenever you book a campaign. The data paradise they dream of allows them to pitch products to a better and better-defined audience and drive wastage out of the system all together. In the meantime, though, their robots and mailing lists, pop-ups and cookies will lay waste to the open and permissive net.
Of course, they're both wrong. Advertising is not evil and is not doomed, even on the internet. And the miserable, ad-saturated environment proposed by the dystopians is doomed to fail.
Ads produce demand and lubricate markets. Even unconventional, open, social markets like the net need the kind of jolt produced by an surprising (read: unsolicited) ad to produce heat, economic activity, change. An entirely ad-free world would be economically sterile, incapable of kicking off new production-consumption cycles. Economic change would slow to a Soviet-era crawl.
Of course, the net already offers dozens of new ways of getting these cycles going. The blogosphere's attention economy already produces hit books and web sites and amplifies ideas with unprecedented efficiency - and not an ad in sight.
So-called "viral" marketing can produce the same kind of pervasive buzz that a good ad campaign produces. But even the net's hyper-connected multitude will never entirely replace the big bang effect of a provocative, well-placed advertisement.
