Paul Douglas's New Forecast

Rash calls the opt-in technology “interesting and innovative.” Given Internet users’ understanding that free content requires advertising support of some kind, he agrees that it makes sense to pursue a model in which the ads have “more relevance and resonance to the end user.” But he says it is too early in the game to predict whether advertisers and their agencies would leap at the chance to participate in NoozMe. “Would advertisers go for it? I can’t answer,” Rash says, “because that depends on what ‘it’ is, eventually.”

More willing to speculate is Andrew Eklund, founder and CEO of Ciceron, a Minneapolis-based interactive-marketing agency that helped design NoozMe’s demonstration version. The opt-in model is highly likely to appeal to Internet advertisers, Eklund says, especially since the effectiveness of mass advertising on the Web—in the form of banners, for instance—is being called into question. There is much worried talk in the industry of “banner invisibility,” as Web users increasingly ignore the boxed ads surrounding the text and videos they want to see.

Douglas's vision is "personalized television, without the clutter, without the spam, with only good stuff that appeals to your life."

Eklund suggests that NoozMe’s you-pick-the-ads concept is similar to paid-search advertising on engines such as Google and Yahoo, where advertising links appear only when the consumer is searching a related topic.

News of the Future

One question facing NoozMe’s model is the extent to which the Internet will change consumers’ newsgathering habits. What if Douglas’s sons and their contemporaries abandon the whole “old-fashioned” concept of a packaged broadcast of news, weather, and sports, regardless of how they could customize it? What if people decide they’d rather just get their news one story at a time, at the moment they’re interested?

Singular Logic’s Williams says that NoozMe can also be used this way. If you go to a Web site to see a single video-news clip about Britney Spears, President Bush, or the Minnesota Twins, NoozMe’s player would show it to you with an ad that you would choose.

Eklund believes that people will value both broadcast and Internet formats. The Internet, he says, is a “lean-forward medium, in which you’re actively engaged in pursuing content.” Television is a more passive, “lean-back medium.” NoozMe aims to combine them.