The Intention Economy

2

The Advertising Bubble

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.

—John Wanamaker¹

Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic.

—Samuel Johnson²

THE ARGUMENT

Advertising is a form of one-way signaling defined from the start as guesswork. As more ways are found for customers and vendors to signal their intentions directly to each other, advertising as we know it will shrink to what only one-way guesswork can do.

Good journalists respect what they call the “Chinese wall.” That’s the virtual partition between what they ...