• by OMMA Magazine Writers , November 3, 2008

How about this? Madison Ave. as Web app. Something launched through Google whenever there’s an ad buy. We’d still have the nostalgia of television shows celebrating the golden age, when men were men and they drank bourbon and talked fast and drank more bourbon and then took a client out to a lunch where yet more bourbon was drunk and then they’d go back to the office and sexually harass a secretary, worry free. Ah, those were the days. A warm, safe and cozy place. But microprocessors don’t drink martinis. And servers don’t make inappropriate comments to female coworkers.

No need to worry about all that after the robots take over, once the people have become sacks of want, confined to loungers in their homes while computer systems deliver all they need. And those systems know what their rotund pets need, because some other system has told them. And that other system knows what it wants because of a bunch of completely automated ad-buy systems have been able to bring it the right ads. Then we all know what happens: Sarah Connor kicks everything’s ass and it all goes back to the way it was before.

Or maybe Ed:Blog has just watched too many movies and too much TV. Perhaps it doesn’t go quite that way, but the walls are coming down, regardless. On the week we went to press with this issue, a couple of things happened: First, Technorati launched its own self-service ad platform — yet more of the sort of thing Catharine P. Taylor discusses in her cover story on the New Madison Avenue. Not exactly earth-shattering. Everybody else is doing it. But still something to note. Then Google announced a deal in which data from its Google Ads TV platform would be integrated into CoreDirect, which also integrates into Donovan Data Systems.

While there’s no reason to start worrying about bone loss in the general population (it’s just direct-response television, after all), it has to make the Old Madison Ave. a little more wary of the New Madison Ave., a street where mutant services — part tech, part agency — already roam.

The Editors
editorial@mediapost.com