Marketing gone wild

I've been getting a lot of weird, random posts from people that apparently haven't been reading the content of my blog, but have posted out of context replies to it anyway. I had my initial suspicions, and this article seems to confirm them. Yes. It's spam.

I went through the Kubler-Ross stages of grief.

Denial.
Anger.
Bargaining.
Depression.

I'm still working on Acceptance. Is nothing safe from this non-targeted advertising tsunami? But I got to thinking about it, and really, it's not surprising at all that we put up with spam.

For instance, I probably get more pre-approved credit card offers per day, or offers to refinance my student loans than I do spam emails. I love how they have printed on the outside "Please Do Not Discard." Yeah, that's gonna work. "Don't throw me away! Please!" might be more effective, but I doubt it. What really irritates me are these student loan financing letters, that do their best to imitate official mail regarding my pending student loans, and then it turns out to be nothing more than a refinancing offer. Some people surely fall for that. My bank actually sent me a valid, $5.00 check, but in the fine print it stated that by cashing it you agree to a service that costs $10.00 per month. I didn't fall for it, but how many others did? It must be pretty discouraging if you offer a product that only gets sold by tricking people into buying it.

And speaking of widely distributed, non-targeted advertisements, what about TV commercials? Do I really need femine hygiene products? Have I, or will I ever, at any point in my life? Yet I've seen hundreds, if not thousands of ads for all manner of them. My wife always complains when she gets spam emails about penis enlargement, but that's just about as relevant to her as Tampax commercials are to me.

Not that I'm defending spam. No way. It's just that it amazes me that we complain so much about it, when in reality it's eerily similar to forms of marketing our grandparents grew up with. As irritating as it is, I can delete about 30 spam messages in the time it takes to sit through one car insurance commercial, and I could probably install a spam filter, delete 60,000 messages, and bake a cake in the time it takes to sit through one of those Tony Little infomercials.

I don't have a solution, yet. But I'm working on one, in all seriousness. Direct, targeted marketing is the future. Google does it, and makes a mint out of it. If someone searches for "Thomas the Tank Engine" on Google, you get about a dozen hits for places that sell Thomas the Tank Engine related goods. Think if the same thing could be done for your TV. What if you could type in some demographics of your household viewers, interests, hobbies, etc., and would only see commercials that were at the minimum relevant to you. With the internet, and media being distributed over the web, it's really pretty easy to imagine.

I don't know if I'd personally like to see directed marketing or not, but if nothing else, it would be more effective. Any ideas?