Markets are about customers, not marketing or advertising.

Markets need customers. In the networked world of the future, however, customers may not need marketing or anything marketing does, including advertising.

Let’s start with two simple fact about today’s connected customers that marketing would rather ignore:

1. They’re the ones who buy stuff. No customers, no markets. Simple as that.
2. Most of them have learned to hate advertising online—especially after it became abundantly clear that they were being stalked by advertising systems, and targeted personally with what the adtech business euphemistically calls “behavioral,” “relevant” and “interest based” messages.
3. In the online world, they’ve found ways to turn advertising off. Massively.
4. Let’s look at some of the numbers for for that:

• GlobalWebIndex says 37% of all mobile users, worldwide, were blocking ads by January of 2016, and another 42% would like to.
• There are than 4.77 billion mobile phone users in the world today.
• That means more than 1.7 billion people are blocking ads already, on their mobile devices alone.
• 1.7 billion is more than twice the population of the Western Hemisphere.

All those numbers are suspect in one way or another. But no shadow of doubt one can cast on them obscures the simple fact that ad blocking is almost certainly the largest boycott in human history.

At the very least this means marketing based on digital observation of people (a big reason people turn advertising off) may not continue to work (which it does at best in a tiny percentage of cases), no matter how much better marketers make it. This is a simple fact that marketers will soon need to face.

People already have more choices than ever over how they spend their time and attention—and soon over their intentions as well. Tools for expressing intention are not going to be marketing’s. They’ll be the customer’s.

If you doubt that, consider these questions:

1. What happens when people can signal exactly what they want better than marketing can ever guess at it, no matter how much marketing tracks people like animals and runs harvested data through the best AI and ML? And when people can send those signals at scale across whole market categories?
2. What happens when people get their own ways (not Google’s or Amazon’s or Apple’s) of relating to the makers and sellers of products and services? One way might be a single dashboard a customer uses to manage all her business relationships as easily as she already manages her calendar and contacts. (Or more easily, since calendar and contact apps still seem stuck in 1997.) So, for example, she can tell every business she deals with that she has a new address, phone number or last name—in one move. With the same or similar tools she can also supply good information about how she uses her products and services, and how and when they need servicing. Right now she has as many ways of doing those things as there are suppliers, each with their own logins, passwords and ways of “delivering” an “experience.” Those ways are supplied by marketing, but they suck across the board because every way is a different way. And the suckage only gets worse with every new login, password and vendor-specific “experience” a customer has to manage, no matter how good the vendor or its suppliers try to make the customer’s experience.
3. What happens when customers have their own ways of managing their own data, and how it is shared and used by others? (Which in fact is required by the GDPR, and soon other laws meant to enable personal agency and autonomy in the digital world.)

Marketing today can’t contemplate anything I described in those three questions, because marketing works for companies, not for customers.

Almost two decades have passed since The Cluetrain Manifesto became a business best-seller, and “markets are conversations” became a marketing mantra. Yet marketing still barely understands what the hell Cluetrain was talking about. I know, because I co-wrote Cluetrain, and “markets are conversations” was my one-liner.

Again, marketing works for companies, not customers. And it has never been about conversation, no matter how much marketers say it is. Well-intended though marketers may want their “conversations” to be, they remain as interruptive and one-sided as ever. Worse, they try to get personal with people who could not be less interested. There is no conversational difference between an “interest-based” ad that jumps in front of you on the Web and a pitch from a stranger paid to call your phone at dinner time. In fact, it’s worse, because what makes the ad “interest-based” is that you’ve been spied on.

For all its talk about “conversation,” “respect” and “care,” marketing is no less insulting of its human targets than it ever was. Just listen to it talk. To them, we remain “targets” to “corral,” “capture,” “acquire,” “manage” and “control” after being herded through “funnels” at the far ends of which we are “locked in”—as if we were slaves or cattle.

Now let’s go back to advertising for a minute, and why it might die. (In fact I’d like to save it, and have thrown a number of life preserver in its direction. Here’s the latest one.)

Before we had the Internet, marketing could aim advertising at whole populations, sending strong creative and economic signals, earning respect for sponsoring those publishers and broadcasters, and deriving good results for both companies and customers. Even when people didn’t buy advertised products or services, they still held strong brand associations in their minds, thanks to good advertising. (I explain more about the difference in Separating advertising’s wheat and chaff.)

Perhaps a $trillion has been spent so far on “relevant” and “personalized” advertising, better known as adtech. Yet not one brand known to the world has been created by it. Worse, media are denied sponsorship (since the ads chase eyeballs to wherever they might “consume content,” no matter how icky the site might be), and ads are maximally creepy when they hit the bulls-eye.

Today people get extra annoyed at advertising, because they know they ought to have the means for making it go away. (This is the Internet, after all: the Land of Everything.) The means for making advertising disappear are now far more available than they ever were when the media’s mainstream consisted of commercial print and broadcasting. Those media are also an ever-shrinking percentage of growing media options in the lives of Net-connected people, who also have many more choices about what to allow or block on their devices, and how they spend their time and attention. Are those people going to want advertising? Really?

It’s no accident that Netflix now has more subscribers than all of cable TV:

Source: Forbes.

Netflix lacks advertising and other forms of interruptive promotion that have been the norm in broadcasting for so long that marketers take those interruptive moments for granted, which is a huge mistake. It also matters that over half a billion people also block ads, tracking or both. Ask why they do it, and most people will simply say “because I can,” or “why not?”

Think about it: if advertisers produced only the best advertising tomorrow, and stopped all tracking (going back to simply sponsoring media the old fashioned way). Would that stop people from blocking it? Would that save the media still supported by advertising?

In a few cases it might. For example, in fashion, sports and tech publishing, the ads are almost like catalog entries. For sports on TV, there’s no way of turning the ads off if you want to watch or listen to live games, which are always packed with ad breaks.

But those at best will be exceptions to new rules written by customers and applied by their tech.

Like it or not, the Internet is turning the marketplace into a dance floor. If marketing isn’t ready for customers to take the lead on that floor, those customers will find other corporate dance partners. Who will that be?

Depends on who listens to signals coming from customers’ own tools.

Think of those tools as #CustomerTech. And expect those tools to give customers full power over their own data, their own lives, their own journeys and their own experiences in the marketplace.

I hope for marketing’s sake that it welcomes being led by those customers.