The Online Advertising Playbook: Proven Strategies and Tested Tactics from The Advertising Research Foundation

A Look Ahead at Emerging Plays

The mission of The Online Advertising Playbook has been to aggregate, evaluate, and integrate what has been learned about advertising online during its initial decade. This final chapter attempts to look ahead into the next decade of online advertising. More of the same? Or significant changes?

Much of the effort to use the powerful new technology called the internet for advertising in the early days was a transfer of practices proven useful in electronic mass media like radio and television. While this transfer provided some value, the big breakthroughs came through e-commerce learning, email adoptions, targeting thinking from direct marketing, and creative leaps congruent with the interactive nature of the internet and most recently the growth and adoption of information and shopping search by consumers.

In order to peer a little more clearly into the future, we asked some experts to share their thoughts via interviews and written contributions. The most interesting part of this futurology exercise was the emergence of three new models of advertising different from the mass-media-rooted interrupt-and-repeat model and the search-based targeting model currently in vogue.

The first model is the permission-based (opt-in) model, centered on engagement, not exposure. The second new model is the one of consumer empowerment where both the time spent with messages and even the generation of messages or word of mouth emanate from the consumer. The final model ...