Ever since I was a child I’ve hated advertising. It seemed silly to me that they kept telling me about cornflakes, even though I already ate them every day! “They should only be allowed to tell me about new things” I remember saying to my mum at about 6. As I got older I also realised how much money (our money) was wasted through these scattergun methods lacking any real science. It’s only been in the last few years that web analytics have been taken on board seriously in big businesses marketing departements, and that’s only managing a small slice of their budget.

Advertising is in a blind race to evolve the loudest, craziest, sexiest or attention-seeking campaign possible. But of course most evolutionary arms-races end up having no net effect, as all competitors constantly level-up with each other. The tobacco industry was a perfect example of this: the ban on advertising was the best thing that ever happened to Phillip Moriss’s and BAT’s share prices because it removed the same burden from all competitors instantaneously, leaving the playing field unchanged but the players immensly more wealthy. So what will they do with all this extra revenue? Well, it’s up to them and their shareholders, but it could go into improved quality, increased production, faster delivery, working conditions, reliability – whatever is at the core of the business values.

So could this work across the entire business world? Well, barring a marketing apocalypse there are several ventures growing which are trying to foster a non-marketing based economy. Perhaps the recent empowerment of the masses via the Internet, mobile devices and social media will enable a step-change in the way we do business.

One such approach is termed VRM or Vendor Relationship Management. The concept behind this is “flipping” the business from CRM where the vendors have to push stuff out to potential customers, and putting the customers in the driving seat. It becomes the customer’s responsibility to connect with their suppliers. Once upon a time this would have been a heavy burden but in the current age of Pinterest and Paypal, EBay and Etsy this is now entirely possible. Combine this with the nascent Maker movement and emerging life-automation tools like IFTTT and Atooma, you start getting the building blocks for an intelligent network of agent-assisted peer-to-peer consumer-manufacturers.

I really love the idea of Doc Searle’s “intention economy”. As a software engineer it seems obvious and efficient to me to listen and respond to “events” when they happen and then do nothing in between. Crap software uses “polling” which is just like mass marketing – ringing people up every day to see if they want to buy something. Good software uses an event-driven model where causality is allowed to flow in the right direction! When someone wants something they ask for it and they very quickly receive. If they don’t ask – they don’t want!

So how can we translate this simple programming model to the real world? We need to give consumers a framework where they can easily “hook into” this event-driven economy, and start publishing events which the businesses can feed off.

One example of an prototype technical platform for this is the Kinetic Rules Engine from Kynetx. It employs a Kinetic Rule Language (or KRL) which enables developers to create applications such as IFFT or Atooma and then link into the emergine Internet of Things, by allowing apps, NFC, Ninja Blocks, Twines and Electric Imps to start triggering these consumer events on the behalf of the general public and take the potential drudgery out of VRM. (I just love the idea that the Web should be used almost as an operating system itself with meta-programs utilising web-hooks and APIs to create incredibly sophisticated emergent features.)

But we need more than technology stacks – we need social change to drive a brand new business model. Amazing social changes have begun on Twitter and Facebook but could the growing pollution of social spaces with push-advertising and revenue tricks actually trigger a revolution in social media itself?

App.net believe so. They are building a new social network platform which is philosophically different – embracing the intention economy and VRM principles at its core. You only have to read some of the reviews from CNN, ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch et al. to see just how revolutionary is could be. Now imagine Facebook’s business model without advertising? Hard isn’t it!

So am I selling you something here? No! I’m just aksing you to imagine another world, and what we might do with all the energy we currently spend painstakingly creating, then ironically avoiding advertising.

Thanks to Mashable for the ad-overload image.

http://mashable.com/2012/02/02/facebook-ipo-online-advertising/