Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

While our society hasn't quite managed holograms that accost you, I can only assume the blueprints are sitting on a workbench somewhere as we speak. Because every week or two, advertisers figure out some new way to colonise some hitherto peaceful space within our society with their incessant yammering.

And the somewhat stalky behaviour exhibited in Minority Report has a parallel in the recent behaviour of the US department store Nordstrom, which admitted to monitoring its customers' location within their stores by monitoring their Wifi connections.

The other day I was at a petrol station filling up my car. No sooner had I detached the pump from the bowser than a screen sprang to life above it, forcing me to endure non-stop jingles as I stood there resentfully. Apparently it wasn't enough for the petrol station to be slugging me the exorbitant price that petrol goes for nowadays....

Computer scientist and author Jaron Lanier has turned his back on the “information wants to free” meme to which he once subscribed, and he thinks advertising as a business model for media is doomed. It’s not just that Craigslist and other Internet businesses have snatched ads away from traditional media, he reckons; it’s that in this digital era, when Google and Facebook increasingly own most of the inventory, not to mention the ad servers and distribution channels, relying on advertising to prop up your media company just doesn’t make sense.

youLanier, the guy credited with coming up with the term “virtual reality,” outlines this thesis in his new book “Who Owns the Future?” which examines the effects network technologies have had on our economy. In an interview with Nieman Journalism Lab, Lanier builds on that case, stating flatly that advertising isn’t a viable business plan for media businesses in the long term. He tells the publication...