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I agree. This kind of email advertising is a very covert and affordable (with a lot of punch) way to advertise!

It is what I call “Ambient Advertising”. It ties in very closely to what we sometimes think of as poorly place advertisements.

I make the connection here:

http://textrapolate.com/2008/06/take-two-ambien...

Unfortunately it seems difficult to measure the “efficiency of changing minds” by any metric – which I think is your point. There's a market for companies that nail the best way to measure that concept.

Most of the ideas you bring up in regards to the importance of data will become more important with the rise of the semantic web. It seems that both semantic advertising and the semantic web will not be able to exist without each other – and as a result user data will become essentially the most defensible asset.

This is a great analysis of the current state of display advertising, its shortcomings, and what needs to happen to bring effectiveness into this space. You'd probably really like what my company, Dapper (http://www.dapper.net), is doing with our new platform, MashupAds (http://www.mashupads.com). By bringing live, constantly up-to-date content and functionality from an advertiser's site into his display ads, we're enriching publisher websites with new features instead of distracting advertisements. MashupAds dynamically extract content from the publisher's website and use it to query and bring back matching content from the advertiser's site.

Effectively, we're marrying the benefits of display advertising (e.g., brand awareness, plenty of inventory, etc.) with the effectiveness of direct response advertising by enriching the user experience of a publisher's website and delivering content inside an ad that matches the user's intent.

Feel free to connect with me if you're interested in hearing more…

Jon

“At some point consumers may even look to control and manage access to their intent data themselves. An opt-in database of user intentions that promises to deliver only relevant content across several mediums would be immensely valuable.”

I think the reason this has not happened yet is because the privacy concerns about advertisers access to demographic/behavioral (D/B) data is overstated by vocal privacy-sensitive bloggers. I think the public at large doesn't really care about how their anonymized D/B data is used, and people would actually respond positively to the dissemination of this data to all players in the ad fulfillment chain if it meant that guys stopped getting tampoon ads and people browsing Prius specs online stopped seeing Hummer ads the next time they went to MLB.com.

The key IMHO is not to put the burden of permissioning on the user (opt-in)… instead, show them the value first and then offer the consumer a way to opt-out. One of the larger links on the TACODA homepage is to the NetworkAdvertising.org collective “Opt-Out” page. I think that prominence of the opt-out link is an important part of D/B advertising relationship with the end-consumer.