Maybe history will defeat itself.
Remember FreePC? It was a thing, briefly, at the end of the last millennium, right before Y2K pooped the biggest excuse for a party in a thousand years. This may help. The idea was to put ads in the corner of your PC’s screen. The market gave it zero stars, and it failed.
And now comes Telly, hawking free TVs with ads in a corner, and a promise to “optimize your ad experience.” As if anybody wants an ad experience other than no advertising at all.
Negative demand for advertising has been well advertised by both ad blocking (the biggest boycott in human history) and ad-free “prestige” TV, (or SVOD— Subscription Video On Demand). With those we gladly pay—a lot— not to see advertising. (See numbers here.)
But the advertising business (in the mines of which I toiled for too much of my adult life) has always smoked its own exhaust and excels best at getting high with generous funders. (Yeah, some advertising works, but on the whole people still hate it on the receiving end.)
The fun will come when our own personal AI bots, working for our own asses, do battle with the robot Nazgûls of marketing — and win, because we’re on the Demand side of the marketplace, and we’ll do a better job of knowing what we want and don’t want to buy than marketing’s surveillant AI robots can guess at. Supply will survive, of course. But markets will defeat marketing by taking out the middle creep.
The end state will be one Cluetrain forecast in 1999, Linux Journal named in 2006, the VRM community started working on that same year, and The Intention Economy detailed in 2012. The only thing all of them missed was how customer intentions might be helped by personal AI.
Markets will become new and better dances between Demand and Supply, simply because Demand will have better ways to take the lead, and not just follow all the time. Simple as that.
*For more on how this will work, see Individual Empowerment and Agency on a Scale We’ve Never Seen Before.
As an aside, the mouth in whch BUY!!! appears is mine. The gold crowns were provided by students of the UNC School of Dentistry, under the direction of Dr. Clinton Max Studevant for just $25 each, half a century ago. The original photo is here on Flickr, was shot with a Sony camcorder that could take low-res stills, and has had more than 80,000 views, which is way more than any of the 80,000 other photos I have on Flickr. I don’t know why.