First I’ll tell you what we won’t do in 2009. What we won’t do is look at the core of the problem. It will be another year of snafu. Online advertising and marketing is intrusive, annoying, difficult to produce, reviewed in isolation away from how it’s consumed, approved by cretins who do not want to admit their own ignorance, and then foisted on the consumer in a mass rapid-fire direct-response-marketing-monstrosity-masquerading-as-advertising where the voluminous data that comes back to agencies is utter mind-boggling complexity that tells us all?… nothing. The agency then presents this refined clusterphuck to the luddite client in order to repeat and refine the loop. The whole process is fubar.

Now, here’s what we may be able to accomplish…

1. Privacy: The scare tactics around privacy online will further dissipate, allowing for better sharing of data among companies, to enable customized targeting which will serve to benefit the consumer. The ads will just be more relevant, and the blurred lines between personal and private lives will help further open the fallacy of the division.

Congress will take up some online advertising issue because one of the members moronic daughters got caught in an online scam, or they themselves did, and are just using their children as scapegoats. They will all rattle their sabers, and in the end nothing will happen. Or, we will get something pathetically ineffective like CAN SPAM or Sarbanes Oxley that just gives an overly paranoid and conservative public confidence that Congress is doing something. The good companies will get punished and then the consumer will bitch about advertising not being relevant… why? Because some idiot hindered the tools that would make it so.

2. Video: A new video ad serving model that divorces the advertising from the current content being viewed will emerge where consumers can build credits for watching advertising and then view any content they want. The consumer gets to watch the content they want, and the advertising for products they are interested in. Simple, no? Look, we have an enormous amount invested in television advertising production and assets and until we all figure out how to translate this to an online video ad model that is not interruptive to the content we’ll never become the rich consumption medium for advertising that will help move our entire industry forward.

3. Websites: The iPhone will grow to 2% of total total internet surfing, forcing most companies (or at least the ones that get it) to improve their mobile versions of their websites, which will be simpler, faster, and more useful to the consumer. Advice, stop using Flash to “wow” your internal staff, and start simplifying your online presence.

4. Banners: Several ad networks will go the way of the dinosaur.. or in our case, Pets.com… WebVan, and Boo.com. It will all be to our benefit as the ones that survive will have better technology and annoy the consumer less. They will have rich media ad serving capabilities that will integrate with the major rich media models, incorporate behavioral targeting and finally be less intrusive. Intrusion is a matter of relevance.

5. Mobile: Mobile advertising will finally start to become a reality with the “Apple Local Ad Serving system.” All iPhone apps will be able to incorporate a standard ad format and the consumer will be able to choose between the paid app, or the free app with advertising. Google will incorporate AdSense to present the first local ad model that works, and capitalize on the long tail of local advertisers utilizing the GPS system in iPhones to present temporal ads while the consumer in locally available.

Oh yeah, and there will be yet another “buzz.” You know, Viral Marketing, which became Buzz Marketing, which became Video Marketing, which became Social Media Marketing, which will become… Just don’t get caught in the wave of the “next big thing” and wait for it to become real. I was listening to a company present this year and when speaking about their marketing they stated they wanted to be the “best second” in the market. I’d advise that for everyone. If you want to blaze a path do it in a start-up, do not overly invest your company resources on the unproven. Be cognizant and track those technologies until they reach the scale that will do your business good.

ranty rant signing off….