[kevinlu310]

Facebook's advertising model is a simple classical displaying advertising model. It need be disrupted seriously. Nowadays, the most popular marketing model is displaying advertising model, which is actually an attention-driven marketing model. However, no matter how good they are context-awared and personalized, they are always guesswork, which can hardly achieve high relevancy. It is extremely difficult to guess users’ actual intention for most cases, even you may have a lot of information of them. For example, it is super difficult to guess what an individual is exactly looking to buy when he walks into a Trader Joe’s, no matter how much information you obtained on him, like his income, profession, age, education and etc. Users’ intentions are always dynamically changing from time to time. There are no general equations that can perfectly predict people’s intentions. As a result, no matter how perfectly a system can attract attentions, attention-driven marketing can never achieve high efficiency and accuracy.

As a matter of fact, nowadays advertisement industry is the biggest bubble of the world. Every year, trillions of dollars completely wasted by irrelevant advertising unnecessarily. What is even worse is, the user experience is badly hurt by ads and spams. Such marketing system can be called as attention-driven marketing system. Everything is done to attract attentions. However, only a few attentions are really attracted, but majority of the attentions may not be finally turned into intentions. As a result, majority of the marketing costs are totally wasted.

The future marketing systems will be built on intentions. Intention-driven commerce systems need let every user to express his/her intentions freely and help him/her achieve his/her intentions in highly optimized way by socialization and crowd-sourcing. The future world needs to be a world without displaying ads, but only pure relevant information that matches users' intentions dynamically and real-timely. This is the very objective of my current startup project as well.

[alain94040]

How do you promote events in your non-bubble view of the world? An event can be in person (imagine TechCrunch Disrupt for instance), or a new TV series launching...

I can imagine very well how I would target people who like the series 24 if I'm launching a new thriller. Or readers of Hacker News for a tech conference. Etc...

[kevinlu310]

If we have such a system, everybody can input his/her intentions. I would input my intentions of attending startup events, and set the expiration date of this intention to for example 10 years. Then whenever there is an event like TechCrunch Disrupt, I will receive a notice with a short list of such events. All users who have set up similar intentions will receive such notice. Meanwhile, TechCrunch Disrupt organizers will receive a list of all users who have such similar intentions. As a result, they can directly send mails, or emails, or even phone calls to these users for highly targeted marketing instead of blindly broadcast their event to the whole general public.

[alain94040]

Your system doesn't sound realistic. Here's a version that works today: once several of your friends sign up for TechCrunch Disrupt, then I'll start showing you ads for the conference. No need to pre-enter any kind of vague intent into some omniscient system.

[kevinlu310]

My system will be very realistic in 5 years. You're still talking about socialized and context-awared ads. It is actually based on very old Attention Economy, which is dominant probably in the past thousand years just because there is no Internet. Now with the help of the Internet, Intention Economy is coming to dominate, because it will optimize the world very much.

[earl]

Do you seriously believe advertisers waste trillions of dollars? That not a single one has turned off ads in a geo-fenced area to see what happens? Or that adwords advertisers (and all direct response advertisers for that matter) don't fanatically track roas?

Also, empirically, users refuse to pay for stuff and want advertising so they're not out of pocket. For the 1e6 + 999th time: " If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."

[kevinlu310]

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." --- John Wanamaker (1838 - 1922)

This is why advertising has been such a profitable business. That's because targeting of traditional advertising system is not good. As a result, traditional marketing has to be attention-driven. You have no better choice other than throwing trillions of dollars to attract attentions, and hopefully several percent of the attracted attentions will be finally converted to your new customers so that your business can continuously run. As a matter of fact, a huge amount of your marketing costs are completely wasted, and it is necessary due to low efficiency of the advertising model. This well-known fact is clearly shown that the low efficient classical display advertising model need be disrupted and replaced.

Fortunately, with the help of Internet and advancement of information processing technology, targeting will be significantly improved, and it has to be improved. However, it could not be attention-based, because attention is intrinsically low efficient on targeting. It has to be intention-based, which is intrinsically well targeted and accurate. For instance, with prior knowledge of your intention on buying some orange juice in front of a Trader Joe's, I will recommend you some good juices. It will be interesting information to me instead of advertisements. On the contrary, it will be totally annoying to me if you shout out at me about some high-end computers just because you know I'm a computer science student or a software programmer, but you don't know I just bought a super cool Macbook last week and don't need a new computer in next few months or even years.

To solve the targeting issue, intention-based marketing systems will be an ideal alternative to current dominant attention-driven marketing systems. Attracting attention is surely helpful. But it has to be complementary, not the primary driving force. It will be intention-based and intention-driven systems that can significantly improve targeting accuracy and marketing efficiency. That is the future!

[earl]

Seriously, are you reading a press release? Also, you're 10-ish years behind, which is how long ad.com has been doing retargeting. Retargeting has widespread since the advent of a global cookie space with exchanges -- rmx in '08 or so. And yet we still have direct response and brand display ads.

[kevinlu310]

Seriously, I am 10-ish years ahead, NOT behind. If you can read a little about Intention Economy, you will understand what I'm talking about.