Fields of solar panels fuel our nations homes and buildings, cars are purely electric and governed by an artificial intelligence that has eliminated traffic jams and enabled vehicles to travel at speeds greater than 300 mph for hours. Humans have begun interfacing with machines and can surf the web from the comfort of their own contact lens.

However, one things missing from a world that has everything - advertising. At least not as we know it today in 2009. In the next 15 years, it is possible that traditional display advertising will be rendered ineffective as a marketing tactic.

This will happen because of two reasons:

1. Technology will empower humans to show and hide what they please in their world, including all forms of advertising (think AdBlock for your eyeballs)
2. Over-cluttering will cause a social immunity to advertising

The first sign of the advertising apocalypse is AdBlock Plus (a program installed in your browser that locates and hides online display advertisements including banners, AdWords and even videos). This technology has over 4,000,000 subscribers (Source: Wikipedia) so clearly, the human race has a dis-interest in messages being forced into their line of sight.

The good thing about this is that technology will create some really awesome ways to push marketing messages to people and become more interactive. You remember the scene from Minority Report where the interactive billboards called people by their first and last names as they walked by it. This technology is coming…if not already here… and I assure you, marketers who have the dollars to leverage new technologies in their favor, will be the first to jump on the big brother bandwagon.

However, even with all of these serious advancements in the tech world, people will still eventually become immune to push-based and interruptive marketing.

So what’s a marketer to do when you live in a world where people can opt-out from seeing advertising wherever they go? It comes down to a simple core principle that’s been around for a while: fulfill an unmet need via both the product and the marketing that supports it. Digital can take this a step further in the right direction.

This need can include the human desire for social currency, i.e. “dude, check out this video on YouTube, it’s hilarious!”. That video just happens to be mildly branded, and drive to an interactive experience that then entertains the hell out of both the dude and the bro who showed him. Recently, the most obvious fit here is mildly branded applications — iPhone apps are a perfect example, widgets were the first iteration of this. However, even applications now are becoming cluttered.

Marketers in 2024 will be faced with some serious challenges as technology only further empowers people to choose what they want to see, when they want to see it. Should be fun.