Why is traditional marketing adversarial?

July 22nd, 2005

From Real Media Riffs , a bit of deep thinking and common sense.

If consumers figure out a way around advertising, advertisers must therefore find a way back in front of them. The only problem is it is a flawed logic that will ultimately doom the advertising business. We've seen it taking place online. Advertisers post banners. Consumers ignore banners. Advertisers employ pop-ups. Consumers arm themselves with pop-up blockers. Advertisers employ adware. Consumers download anti-adware software. And it goes on. It's like an arms race whose outcome is inevitable: mutually assured destruction, or the devolution of the advertising marketplace.

As budgets migrate from TV to elsewhere, marcomms companies are still thinking PUSH & INTERRUPT before they think anywhere else.
Yet, Soshana Zuboff, author of The Support Economy argues that despite the centrality of consumption for and advanced economy, and the fact that everyone is a consumer, people have come to accept that their consumption experiences will be largely adversarial.
There is another way you know – its just that the entire marcomms business is pretty much built on a model of interruption.
The post talks about a system could DAOS, a Digital Asset Operating System. Which will enable us all to select, self-schedule etc., All our digital assets. We become the gatekeepers of what we consume.
And we no longer live in a linear command-and-control society.

but unlike previous media gateways – TV networks, cable operators, satellite systems, closed-wall Internet service providers, and the like – the gatekeepers of these new media operating systems won't be technologists, or media content providers, or even advertisers. It's going to be the people who consume media. And the sooner we understand that, the sooner we can figure out how to give them what they want, and get what we need in return.

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