Predicting the future

Doc Searls, on Twitter, links to some predictions for the future of marketing.

If you read that, it looks like the future will be...basically, copied from a white paper about retargeting.

Yawn slash eeew.

You can't just predict that the future is like today but more so. That would have gotten us "interactive TV" instead of the Web.

I'm not going to predict the future of Marketing in general, but since there's a lot of attention to one corner of it, here goes.

Consolidation. I don’t know if we’ll get all the way down to a two-logo Lumascape, but single digits, maybe. Two-sided markets tend to consolidate, because buyers go where the sellers are and vice versa. This isn’t happening in web advertising, because agencies have an interest in artificially complicating the online ad business, and venture capitalists have funded a lot of competing, minimally different, startups that will take time to settle out. But with more scrutiny on agencies because of the rebates problem, and less incoming VC money to adtech, it will be easier to see the consolidation happening.

More and harder math. As complicated as the math in online ads is now, it’s about to get more interesting and potentially way more important. Right now, online advertisers are playing a relatively simple level zero game of maximizing response rate given the available ability to target users in each medium. The next step is the level one game where brands and publishers re-shape the medium (and the ability of users to control it) in order to adjust how well the medium’s users can be targeted by a brand and its competitors.

An ad medium that facilitates collection of information from the user also limits transfer of information to the user, which is necessary for brand building (There’s no free lunch). Brands and publishers will need to adjust the balance of targetability and signal-carrying ability. That means that over the next several years, advertisers will have to solve level one problems in the areas of Behavioral Economics and Signaling.

More memorable ads. As a user, right now you’re seeing a lot of crappy ads, because the problem of measuring immediate response to a terrible ad is easier than the problem of measuring Brand Equity changes as the result of a signal-carrying ad. The terrible ad problem is temporary. Advertising is not a zero-sum struggle with math and technology on one side, and creative on the other. Better math will have the side effect of informing and justifying better creative.

Ad blockers fade to the background. Right now, the ad blocker is a threat to legit ads because new blocking development is sustained by the paid whitelisting model and because high-value and low-value ads are delivered the same way. High-value ads will beat ad blocking, possibly with a combination of

• legal and regulatory attacks on paid whitelisting

• front-ending the CMS with a proxy server that stitches ads into place and obfuscates IDs and classes

• limiting third-party tracking that facilitates low-value and fraudulent ads

Ad blockers (and other privacy tools, as a side effect) will still catch the crap ads. And advertisers will still have to consider ad blocking, but in the background, much as email newsletter senders have to consider the spam filter. Go watch that Johnny Ryan video that I linked to last time.

(This post started as an answer on Quora so go upvote there if you do the Quora thing.)