Yesterday evening I read the following findings from Yankelovich Partners on what the American public thinks about advertising:

• 65 percent said they "are constantly bombarded with too much" advertising
• 61 percent said the amount of advertising and marketing to which they are exposed "is out of control"
• 60 percent said their opinion of advertising "is much more negative than just a few years ago"
• 54 percent said they "avoid buying products that overwhelm them with advertising and marketing"
• 69 percent said they "are interested in products and services that would help them skip or block marketing"

[ source: Church of the Customer ]

After digesting this information, which also further proved my beliefs on the future of marketing, I quickly modified the speech on Internet marketing I was giving at a telecommunications conference today.

The permission-based marketing philosophy that works on the Internet should be applied to all aspects of marketing. We can no longer push our prospects with blatant advertising messages --- instead, we need to focus on the real benefit the prospect gets by interacting with us. Prospect and customer interaction must carry a clear and concrete benefit for our recipients.

Why? Given the general attitude toward advertising, we'll soon only be able to market only to people that actually want to receive our communications (I'm not talking only about direct marketing, but all forms of marketing). And they'll only want to receive them if there's much in it for them.

Our audiences can interact and communicate with thousands of companies worldwide. Why should they choose us?

Let's also not forget about the spam problem --- our e-mails will only get through (and even this only if we're lucky) if the recipients really want them. And what will happen when our e-mails stop coming through altogether?

At that point our "benefit power over our audiences" will need to be strong enough to help us convert these audiences to new communications mediums such as RSS, mobile, etc.

The bottom line is simple: getting our messages through is becoming increasingly difficult, either because of the clutter or because our audiences simply don't want to communicate with us.

All this makes being a marketer in the 21st century a great challenge ... and a great pleasure. Yes, this is the best time to be a marketer ...