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Comment by adjwilli | Hacker News Reader

I agree with a lot of this analysis, but one things stuck out: "Marketing will become better – and harder to resist." While I don't doubt that marketing will become better, I do think we'll develop ways of filtering it out just as we have with "banner blindness", SPAM filtering and DVR-skipping commercials. Maybe the people who continually bug their friends about some cause, campaign or product will tend to lose those friends too. It wasn't uncommon to hear people say they're unfriending people on Facebook during the last election for political posts. I know I personally tried hard to resist posting political comments on social networks to maintain peace and tranquility from amateur campaigners.

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I think our ability to resist marketing decreases marginally with each marginal increase in quality. At a certain point it does become useful, and we don't want to resist. Telling me about a product I really do want and/or need and can afford, that I ultimately buy, is not the type of marketing we will learn to resist. To a certain extent we even seek it out (Twitter followers, catalog subscriptions, etc.)

I think that the overall idea that marketing will become better will be true, but not until after it becomes worse.

Now that the best minds of political campaigning have shown the way forward on the bring your friends along front, the hacks are all going to take a whack at it. And they will kick that horse to death and probably decry the failure of personalized marketing.

However, there will still be the professionals who know how to use personalized email marketing surgically to accomplish a goal. Perhaps they will have to be more implicit in the future. They will also have to accept that there is a ceiling to the power of this new tool. I don't believe that that ceiling has been hit yet however.

This is a really interesting point - I think the question will really come down to how well campaigns / businesses can measure the impact of their marketing. If your messages/posts aren't driving donations or purchases (or hurt the long term usefulness of the person you're marketing to), then you won't run them.

The problem is that today most marketing is blind - completely unlinkedin from the impact it causes. I'm counting on technology / big data / analytics to change that.

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