know | Future

In the April issue of the Digital Journalist, there is a column by Terry Heaton that proposes an interesting concept for the future of advertising in a consumer centric pull environment. Terry posits that advertisers should be moving away from the traditional role of attracting attention from consumers that are tuning out traditional big splash advertising and instead producing small bits of advertising content to be set free on the Internet to find their way to self-targeted consumers.

Though not revolutionary by any means, Terry’s model with advertisers producing discrete encapsulated content: bits of video, images, specifications, product information, xml data dropped in an rss feed and passed through a three stage sieve of search engines, dumb aggregators (automated blogs) and editorial aggregators (blogs and social networks) on their way to consumers is simple and elegant.

The problem as always, is tracking success so that clients will pay you fairly for the production of that advertising stream.

via the MIT Advertising Lab blog