The Coming Ad Revolution

Esther Dyson's recent article, The Coming Ad Revolution in the WSJ pretty much summed up my feelings regarding online direct marketing.

She notes how in the online advertising model, "users will be barraged by ads to which they will pay less and less attention" and that in today's social networks "each user determines who will get into his own garden, whether friends or vendors".

The VRM movement goes further still by providing " customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties". Helping this effort, the working group on Data Portability is defining standards by which a consumer can publish themselves.

Pages on this blog illustrate how an individual can create his/her own garden by creating an index of their online presence, publishing a marketing profile of themselves that they control and actually stating their wants and needs.

The "new value creators" in Esther Dyson's article include not only the established companies such as Jellyfish and Reardon Commerce but a host of small and tiny startup ventures such as Boxbe, AdaptiveBlue, OneSwirl, Particls.com and my own mysterious project that I will be unveiling very soon.