It is estimated that more than 7.3 million new people gain access to the world wide web every month. Current North American Internet penetration is listed at 74.4%. Roughly 3 out of 4 people you come across every day have internet access, as opposed to 100% for television. Television has taken 125 years to reach 100%. The Internet has only been around 26 years 2 months, 6 days and 9 hours as of this writing (according to www.howoldistheinternet.com, naturally.) The growth and ubiquity of the Internet will not be denied by culture or border. It is here. It is clear. The Audience is hooked on the Internet.

But the Audience is not hooked on advertising, as you know from reading these pages for the past four years. Professor Eric Clemons, of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, recently caught on. Professor Clemons argued recently in TechCrunch that the Internet will shatter all forms of advertising. “The problem is not the medium, the problem is the message, and the fact that it is not trusted, not wanted, and not needed,” was his spin on it. In the Professor’s belief that advertising will fail, he joins the growing group of thought leaders who are validating our position that this truly is the dawn of the Post-Advertising Era and that Advertising is in dire need of reivention.

Prof. Clemons dares to take it further by suggesting that “There must be something other than Advertising” (to sell products). We hasten to agree. But if we were to look down the same road as our professor, we might see a different view of of our industry on the edge. For as web domains grow at an exponential rate that dwarfs the national deficit, the available advertising inventory goes up and up and the price per exposure goes down and down as new arrivals undercut established domains. It is only a matter of time before advertising is no longer a viable revenue generator for content providers. At that point the monetization of the web will begin in earnest. And interactive advertising will become like bus bench advertising. There, but irrelevant.

The internet will belong to the Audience. The Audience will decide who lives and who dies, not the advertising industry. The ability to “push” messaging through the media to the Audience will be as effective as product placement on HBO, only with a government warning attached. This is not decades away. This is moments away. The tipping point may in fact be eminent as technological innovation offshore strives to compensate for our own economic stupidity.

Over at IAPIA the vampires are telling us that they foresee two Internets emerging:

The public Internet that is a virtual no-man’s land, of dubious and/or booty-ass technology platforms and thugware designed to mug the unsuspecting netwalker and,

The private Internet existing as a honeycomb of personal and corporate firewalls and captive cloud networks that serve up a highly complex and seemingly endless universe of custom-tailored web content and web services for those who can afford to be connected yet protected.

This second sphere, the private Internet, is where the NeoAdNets will grow and prosper. The Audience of each NeoAdNet will be sufficiently engaged enough to assure that their trusted (and sponsored) content resource is never more than a click away.

Hopefully, we are not April Fools for believing that we can reinvent advertising so that it can become trusted, wanted and needed once more. This is a tall order for NeoAdvertising. But considering the potential alternative, we have no choice, save but to try.

NOTE: Will anybody out there who lives in the Chicago/Carbondale Area who would like to be involved in an IAPIA Project please drop us a note by clicking here.