A fateful day is coming when there will be no more advertising, marketing, or public relations. Why? Simple: we're killing our industry by being too successful at it.

The communications field keeps finding new ways to send sales messages to target audiences, and by utilizing these new methods to the maximum extent possible, we are strangling the effectiveness of all media. Quite frankly, marketing intrusiveness is out of control.

Ads Beyond Counting.
Some reports claim you'll view 10,000,000 ads in your lifetime, yet with new communication channels and new techniques of marketing, that number is probably under-estimated.

Sponsored data is built into your mail, e-mail, Web sites, video games, online games, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, and media broadcasts. Ads are delivered by TV, radio, phones, outdoor boards, private vehicles, and transit posters. Marketing messages are sprayed on walls, chalked on sidewalks, printed on condoms, acted out in the streets, waiting to ambush you in restrooms, and beamed at you from electronic displays of every shape, size, and description, including sound-emitting urinal cakes.

Viral creations contain ad messages. Word of mouth advertising (WOM) is expanding fast. Channel One delivers commercials to kids in schools.

In stores, RFID (radio frequency identification) chips track your purchases. Watch TV and your selections are tracked. Online, every click is monitored. That information is available for sale, so demographic and psychographic data can be accumulated and you, the targeted consumer, can be more accurately reached.

Sponsormania.
Phrases like this emerge from your radio and TV: "Welcome to the Nextel Halftime Report, brought to you by Toyota." They might reel off a whole string of sponsors for a ten-minute programming segment that features interviews with players and coaches wearing corporate logos while standing in front of electronically shimmering backgrounds displaying other corporate logos. The way we're going, we can soon expect to hear: "Welcome to C-SPAN's coverage of the Halliburton Congress, brought to you by Bechtel."

Ads by the Pound.
Grab the Sunday morning newspaper. Weight: 3.4 lbs. Remove the advertising booklets, inserts, leaflets, flyers, announcements, mini-magazines, and the classified section. Remaining weight of news sections: 1.2 lbs. But each of these sections also contains ads. And some entire sections could be viewed as ad-oriented, such as Entertainment, Style, Food, Real Estate and Automotive.

Most of us don't begrudge the puffery in the movie or TV sections, but we're blurring the line between information and marketing in all other areas of the paper.

In an "article" on a new car were the following phrases: "