So since I’ve come to TBG, I’ve found myself thinking more and more about the state and future of advertising, and all paths of thought have led me to a singular conclusion: The Internet will be the end of Advertising. As we know it. And we should be glad.

Advertising is a funny thing, in that it was born of and continues to conform to the mediums available. Before there was mass communication, there was really no mass marketing. People went to the market, and they parsed the hawker’s claims of superior product with the word of mouth from trusted friends and cross-refrenced it with the price. In other words, they knew the product, they knew the seller, and they knew what others had told them about it. Sound familiar?

All of this changed when mass media became commonplace. First there were ads in newspapers, then on buildings, then magazines, then radio, then television, movies, “product placement”, and now, finally, the internet. In each of those instances save the last one, there has been a common thread. The information, the message, has been easily controlled and manipulated. During the Cola Wars, the only one Pepsi had to worry about was Coke. They didn’t have to worry about the consumer.

This, I would argue, was a bad thing for everybody (advertisers included, but I’ll get to that). As expensive as advertising is, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than retooling your whole operation to make a better product. It’s easier to sell an image than research and develop. And so it was; consumers were left as pawns in a detached power struggle.

Then the Internet came along, and most everybody made the mistake of thinking this was just another substrate to apply their selling methodology to. Slap up a virtual billboard in a virtual bar and people will flock the way they always have. No worries – it’s cheap! It’s fast! Best of all, it’s easy. Anyone can do it. However, the main difference between the Internet and all the mediums that came before it, the quintessential, defining characteristic of what makes the Internet such an essential invention and evolution of mass media, is that it is not a single booming voice, but a chorus without a conductor.

The Internet is not controlled by anyone. It is a product of every single user, no matter how large or small their contribution. It is a conglomerate of everyone’s knowledge, bias, interest, whim and habit. It is a modern Oracle of Delphi, except now the knowledge is open-sourced. Or, perhaps more accurately, it’s a collective hive. I’m not going to get into village dynamic theory here – it’s well documented elsewhere (again, the brilliant and often frustrating part of the Internet is that if you want to write about something, chances are someone has already done so, and extensively.)

But why is this bad for Advertising? And why is it good for us, as a society? Because the Internet levels the playing field, and this results in better products.

Say you’re a company who makes a camera. Your camera is decent, but pretty unremarkable. It’s neither the worst or best in the marketplace. In the old model of advertising, when you could control the message about a product, you would leverage your camera’s mediocre specs by aligning it and your brand with some sort of market image. You would depend on that to sell your camera, increase your market share, so you could inevitably sell more boring cameras.

But the Internet makes this exceedingly difficult, for 2 reasons. One, the price of your camera and others is flat. Since the Internet is a global marketplace, you can buy the same model camera from a variety of stores both large and small, both virtual and anchored in the real world. Price can no longer be regional. A person from India can buy a camera from Abe’s of Maine. The only thing that separates sellers is their dependability and credibility, which takes us to reason number two: you can’t subvert the collective voice.

The Internet empowers consumers in ways that traditional media can’t. There are literally, LITERALLY millions of places where you can voice your (dis-)satisfaction about your purchases, experiences, travels, etc. Even if the manufacturer can try to control the positivity of the reviews on their own site (hello, Apple!), they can’t control the review sites, the reviews on reseller sites, the horror stories on blogs, the E.E.C.B. Consumers are using this open-source information, empowering themselves through collective experiences, becoming savvier and more educated than before. The voice is universal and powerful, self-editing and selfless. It lives.

So faced with the fact that you can’t control your message anymore, and you can’t depend on sales and specials, what do you do? Well, if you’re a smart company, you take the money you’ve been spending on advertising and you start spending it in R&D, making a better camera. You do research, you fund technological innovation. Because, when all things are equal, the only leverage you have is quality.

Some companies already know this. Apple knows this. As smart and cognizant they are at cultivating a brand image and brand aura, they have backed that aura up with seriously good products, probably some of the user-frendilest technology since the invention of the computer. Their advertising is successful (although increasingly smug) because they showcase the product of their insane research and development.

Now that’s well and good for tech companies, but what if you’re Charmin? All the R+D in the world isn’t going to much improve commodity products like toilet paper. Commodity products depend on the success of you remembering their name and brand from relentless, omnipresent advertising. So if that’s taken away, what can you do to make your product stand out? You become a good corporate citizen.

Look at Whole Foods. Whole foods spends less than a tenth on advertising than their competitors, and most of this is announcing new store openings. Their entire corporation is built (quite successfully) on the idea that if you create a brand that people like, people will shop there. If you give out samples, if you are a model corporate citizen on the issues that matter to your customers, well, you don’t have to advertise that bananas are $.10 off this week. When price is relatively negligible, people will choose the brand they feel best about. If traditional advertising stops working (as it’s starting to on younger generations), being an admirable brand is all you’ve got left.

Zappos.com recently stopped advertising free overnight shipping on their products, but they continued to do it. Why? When asked about it by obviously upset customers, Zappos put it this way: “Nothing’s changing about our free overnight shipping, we’re just not advertising it anymore. It’s true that we would probably get more customers if we continued to market free overnight shipping as opposed to surprising customers with it, but we decided that we wanted Zappos to be known as a customer service company, not a marketing company.“

We’ve also seen the proof-of-concept as we’ve grown TBG. Flash-heavy brand sites have given way to Branded Utility, the idea that your client should create something genuinely useful to its customers and give it away for free. A benevolence. These projects have worked well for the clients who say yes to them, because in the end, we’re all inhabiting the Internet, so why not make it a better place to be? Why not give away a widget that lets you tell your friends where you’re traveling if you’re Jet Blue? Why not give away free downloads of new Guitar Hero songs if you’re a record label? All of these things only serve to improve your brand and make your customers jazzed that they know about you.

So shouldn’t all this make me worry? I mean, being ostensibly in the “Ad” biz, shouldn’t I be concerned that about something that will lead to the decline of the industry? How will I pay for all of my quirky hobbies? Shouldn’t I be terrified?

Nope. And you know what? Neither should you.

Advertising at its worst, at the peak of its hubris, was the antithesis of good design. There are more than one parallel to be made to the record industry, aside from the fact that their inability to control this new media is what has lead to their undoing. Both were, in their heyday, were purely profit driven, with little to no interest in what the consumer actually wanted (because we’ll tell you what you want, thank you very much), and little to no investment in creating a better product. Both have become massive, bloated, impossibly wealthy, and both have had their best days behind them.

All of this was bad for consumers. And, in the end, we are all consumers.

The disconnect from advertiser and consumer, this idea that somehow we who advertise are separate from we who consume is a dangerous illusion. We too often in our careers have dumbed down or short-changed the consumer’s rights and abilities to differentiate products in the marketplace. The consumer was the enemy, and the enemy was ourselves. At the end of the day, when you leave your job, you consume. Sure, you might be more wary of advertising, more cognizant, but that doesn’t mean you can escape its influence. You buy toilet paper that someone else has marketed to you. You buy a camera that is less than stellar because you’ve been led to believe it’s a good fit with your lifestyle. You like Ashton Kutcher. He likes Nikon. You like Nikon. This is bad design. As soon as we forget and dismiss the consumer as the most important aspect of product development, we run the risk of shortchanging ourselves.

I’ve seen this with my parents, who, as members of the generation most bombarded by traditional advertising, still buy things based on magazine adverts. They think they’re making good decisions, and I watch as they are frustrated and disappointed by a slew of products that are cheaply made, poorly thought out and designed for disposal. Before the iPhone, when was the last time you loved your mobile? Seriously? These products were badly designed because the manufacturer was subscribing to the old model – we let advertising tell the consumers what they want and they like it. But they don’t.

The Palm Foleo is an interesting case study. Never heard of it? I’m not surprised. The Foleo was designed as a small laptop companion to the Palm Centrino. About the size of a large paperback, it was meant for composing long form emails and blog posts when a Palm keyboard would be downright painful. But the Foleo was deeply flawed as a concept – why would you carry a device that was 3/4 the size of your laptop but with much less functionality, when it required you to carry your Palm anyway?

In the old model, this likely wouldn’t have mattered until it made it to the marketplace. Palm would have focus-grouped the Foleo, made minor adjustments to their preconceptions, and pushed it on an unwelcoming public with billboard ads near the Airport and spots during prime-time news shows.

But the Foleo only exists as a prototype today because it met the Internet. It was shown at some trade shows, and then reviewed by some tech blogs. User comments were exceedingly negative. Engadget famously panned it, telling Palm in an open letter on how to fix their company that they should scrub the Foleo before it launched. And that’s exactly what Palm did. The world is free of this useless device because the consumer had their say before it was too late.

As the Internet grows, as the generations who have never known a world without it become the dominant generation, brands and companies alike are going to have to rethink how they do business. It’s no longer simply retooling your message to fit into a banner ad. It’s retooling your entire brand position to be the best company you can be.