Commentary

Fast Forward: Hitting Pause

As you might expect, I spend a good deal of my time searching for information. But as I write this month's column, I find myself in the position of going out of the way to avoid some information. You see, I am a Harry Potter fan, and at midnight my daughter and I will be heading to the local Border's in our town to pick up copies we've reserved of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final book in the series written by J.K. Rowling. The problem is that spoilers have already leaked the plot on the Internet and I'm doing my best to avoid stumbling across that information.

I even had to sweat out some fact-checking I needed to do for this column, for fear that I might inadvertently land on some information that would reveal more than I'm ready for. I made sure only to navigate to "safe" pages, like Rowling's official site and that of her publisher, Scholastic.

For the past week, I've had to stick my fingers in my ears and blurt "Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, I can't hear you," every time someone brought the book up in conversation, or even as I flipped the dial on my TV set and landed on a news report about the book and the leaks.

I was intrigued, but feared reading a New York Times book review released in the days prior to the book's release, because I knew it revealed some of the plot, and because I knew Rowling was miffed at the Times about it.

Surely there have been times in my life when I went to great lengths to avoid certain information--school grades, "We need to talk" conversations with now ex-girlfriends, my annual review at MediaPost--but those were all specific encounters.

The magnitude of Potter plot leakage was so profound that it got me experiencing something I never thought I'd come across in this wonderfully accessible, on-demand information age. It got me wondering if there's a "non-demand" equivalent. How do you turn it off?

You can't, of course. You can only do your best to manage it. Information flies at us so fast and from so many places that knowledge and insight are now a constant stream punctuated by those isolated moments of indelible epiphany--like the kind I expect to experience over the next few days as I draw to the close of not just the Deathly Hallows, but a magical story arc that has taken me more than a decade to get to the conclusion of.

So far, so good. I've managed to navigate my way around Muggle minefields, and avoid a premature encapsulation. But the experience got me thinking about a new kind of privacy issue: It's not the right to keep our identities private, but the right to keep ourselves ignorant about information we do not want to receive--at least until we want to receive it.

Naturally, that's an oxymoron for our industry, which is predicated on finding ways of getting information to people who may not necessarily want it. That surely has been the foundation of Madison Avenue's classic interrupt and repeat model.

But as we are discovering, new models for conveying information--even marketing pitches--are emerging, and Madison Avenue already has come upon three: advertising on-demand, advertising as a service, and advertising that is "permission-based." Those models, which come out of the Advertising Research Foundation's new Online Advertising Playbook, are the subject of a feature story in this issue.

And unlike certain intrusive electronic media, you only have to read it if we have your permission. Just like you expect to do with Rowling's latest novel.

Joe Mandese

Editor-In-Chief

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