Tomorrow: Bye, bye Googles

TECH TALK: The Emerging Internet: From Advertising to Invertising

Rajesh Jain's Weblog on Emerging Technologies

Advertising has become the primary business model on the consumer Internet.
Even though display advertising has been around since the early days of the Internet, it is search-linked and context-linked advertising that is now dominant. Whichever way we look at it, companies pay to be in front of users on the Internet. Whether we are surfing content sites or searching for things, advertisers use a mix of text and banner ads to attract our attention. The Internet has made advertising campaigns easy to roll out for a large number of businesses, all one needs is a "landing page" where users click to and a credit card to pay for anything starting at a few dollars. Advertisers are also able to track the "clickthroughs" thus enabling them to measure the response to their ads. In other words, the Internet has brought efficiency and metrics to advertising.

There are existing customers that a business has. These are the entire universe of customers who have done at least one transaction with the business. There are loyal customers, who do repeat business and thus are the more profitable ones. Third, there are the future customers, the ones who have yet to do a transaction and whom the business is interested in targeting.
They can also be thought of as prospects. They are former customers or a competitor's customers, who have either exited the relationship with the business or are doing business with a competitor. (There may be some overlap between the third and fourth categories.)

Advertising helps businesses build brand, retain existing customers, and convert prospects into customers. Invertising helps build relationships with existing customers to make them into profitable, loyal customers, and prevent them from becoming former customers. In fact, invertising can also help in educating future customers to initiate a business relationship.

So far, businesses have not had the means to do invertising and build relationships. This is where the mobile comes in, with its reach, its ability to handle subscriptions and provide new content to users as soon as it is published. Brands and businesses can encourage users to subscribe to content channels published by them, think of these as "infostreams".
Users can subscribe to these infostreams by simply sending an SMS from their mobiles, a capability available on every mobile. To unsubscribe, users can send yet another SMS. This ability to start and stop infostreams shifts control to the users and ensures a spam-free environment.

Think, for a moment, about the relationships one would like to have, wherein we are as interested in knowing what's new as the business as in letting us know. The neighbourhood kirana store, the bookshop, the multiplex, the phone manufacturers, deals from the supermarkets, these will form the anchor for the invertising-centric business model of the Live Web. They will all be willing to pay a "relationship fee" to maintain an open communication channel to customers.

Tomorrow: The Next Google
Rajesh Jain's



I agree to all but the use of "mobile".
I think the Internet, as it is, is a much better tool to invertising.
And very important for advertising and invertising in a very near future will be the IPTV as I see it.
As a STREAM like TV, but with millions of channels, where a company could handle its own channels and allure customers offering good content WITH COMMERCIALS in it, or content regarding the products they offer.
The most alluring the content, the biggest the number of users, the biggest the number of users the widest spread Brand and so on...

Tomorrow: Bye, bye Googles...
Patrizia