You and your mobile device are the target.

In Chris Brogan‘s and Julien Smith‘s book Trust Agents, they write, “It has been said that the Web is different from all other media developed over the past 50 years, and that’s because it wasn’t created for advertisers and commercialism. Newspapers, radio, TV, and even movies were fashioned around that.”

TV and radio were inventions of wonder. The advertising drove the technology’s evolution because that’s where the money was. Technology is an expense, and does not generate revenue. It’s what you do with it. It’s true that the last several decades worth of communication have been shaped by advertising. But it drives an interesting discussion about the near future.

It can be argued that advertising has diminished the democracy of traditional communication. Almost every single aspect of traditional communication is dictated by the amount of money the message can generate. Think about a new fall TV show that lasts for six episodes but is cancelled. The viewership is not high enough for advertisers to promote during the program’s time, forcing the program off the air because it has no stream of income. The advertisers will go where the eyeballs are.

Conversely, the golden rule applies: The more money advertisers pour into a medium, the more control they exert over its execution. There’s a reason that the Coke cup is always facing forward in front of Randy Jackson on American Idol.

Someone is paid to make sure Coke has more face time than Randy.

The along comes the internet, the world’s most insane digital soap box, where everything and everyone can be heard. This was supposed to be a dream come true for advertisers.

One Teensy Weensy Little Problem

The most popular content on the Web is being produced by regular people with no agenda, and it’s far more entertaining than anything coming from Hollywood. A boy biting his brother’s finger has more views (330 million) than the 2011 Super Bowl (111 million).

What drives the popularity of sites and blogs is not advertising. It’s people, networks of people who use the digital equivalent of “word-of-mouth” to tell others about what they see on the Web. How many people out there randomly surf YouTube? Most people see videos sent via email, or on some other website, and they share it with others. How much of that is sanctioned by an advertiser’s checkbook?

3. . .2. . .1. . .aaaaand we're viral.

Advertisers can’t control the medium or the message right now. So where does this put us?

We Are At a Crossroad.

We continue to see the purported decline of traditional media (TV, radio, newspaper/print) and the rise of social media (social media being a broad brush stroke here to cover the web, facebook, mobile, etc.). Just like the advent of television, mobile is a bright shiny object that people want to use to get and share information.

Advertisers want to get there to sell sell sell.

Here’s why it’s interesting: The mobile and social media we use to connect and engage with our world are dominated by the user, not the advertiser. The advertiser is stuck for two reasons:

Opt-In

There’s no way advertisers can get on your phone unless you let them. When you watch a program on TV, you have no choice what advertiser comes into your living room at any given moment during commercial breaks, especially with reality TV. With online and mobile, you can simply say “no,” and completely shut an advertiser out of an impression.

The User Dictates The Relevance

We say this a lot in digital signage: “Right Content, Right Place, Right Time.” Out of every possible effort to make content relevant to a situation, the undeniable driving factor is the customer. The customer dictates where she will go, what she will buy, and how she will engage with her network both online and in the real world. And she will bring the tools with her to manage her life on her terms.

Which scenario do you see: Full-length Mad Men episodes popping up on video sharing networks all over the place? Or Facebook and Twitter on a sidebar on your TV screen? What do you think makes American Idol so popular? I reckon it has less to do with the talent than it does with the chance to see whether or not the singer you voted for moves on or goes home. The tools we use to engage are moving into the traditional communication space faster than traditional media moving outside its own box.

Click on the picture to see what happens when your favorite idol is voted off.

In a sense, social media is taking over almost every single way we communicate. And right now it’s giving advertisers fits because they don’t know what will go viral or when, and they haven’t yet cracked the carrier’s willingness to push ads on people without their consent.

Just so you know, that will happen someday. Money talks.