Please try to bear in mind that "yes" they do use search engines but they go there to look for something else, somewhere else to go...most certainly they do not go there to see advertising!

In "Marketing Myopia" Theodore Levitt wrote:

"The reason (the railroads) defined their industry incorrectly was that they were railroad oriented instead of transport oriented. What the railroads lack is not an opportunity but some of the managerial imaginativeness and audacity that made them great. Even an amateur like Jacques Barzun can see what is lacking when he says : "I grieve to see the most advanced physical and social organisation of the last century go down in shabby disgrace for lack of the same comprehensive imagination that built it up".

Much the same could be said about the advertising industry, advertising agencies have ignored Interactive Communication forever that is because they are in love with creativity and media manipulation and have completely forgotten the process of communication.

Interactive Communication is marketing from the customer's point of view. The Internet represents a new marketing dynamic, where the market, does not give one dam about Top-Down-Management together with its convoluted, self-deluded marketing packages.

But hey, here they go again, pouring huge sums of money into Internet Advertising, poor deluded fools, they haven't cottoned onto the fact that they, the market, could not care less about their slick, glib, glittery advertising programmes.

Instead of Advertising-as-Usual Advertising Agencies should be encouraging their Clients to indulge themselves with Interactive Marketing Communication...because Interactive Communication is a powerful technique much better suited to effective communication than Top-Down demographic slicing so typical of broadcast media.

Interactive Communication would enable companies to stop marketing completely - by that I mean in the sense of marketing to and marketing at because it would repersonalise the communication process connecting people (but most certainly not Top-Down-Management) to each other.

When you start to produce interactive advertising "Events" your customers start talking to you, yes, having conversation with you, and that is when you really will be making significant progress!

All advertising is a form of learning whereby you are asking people to change their behaviour after learning the benefits of the products or services you offer.

However, we all tend to filter out information, which we do not want to hear. This clearly alters the effectiveness of conventional advertising in quite a dramatic way.

The final purchase decision is invariably a compromise and this leads to a certain amount of anxiety; the worry that perhaps the decision was not the best or the right one. In order to minimise this anxiety the purchaser seeks to reinforce their choice and begins to take more notice of their chosen product's marketing communications.

Due to a lack of understanding of the communication process we have created a media society during the past 40 or 50 years, where the whole process has been de-humanised.

There is now an extraordinary reduction in interaction because conventional advertising and marketing have become a one-way practice whereby information is disseminated in a passive form.

But, people still have this desire to be taken account of. To affect change, to learn and personalise their relationship with their environment. There are a phenomenal number of reasons that cause people to interact, going far beyond just giving them things.

When people agree to participate in truly interactive marketing programmes they are told that their efforts and feedback are of positive help to the advertisers.

And most important to the advertisers, by participating and becoming involved, they then learn and understand the advertising message and do so at their own pace and to fit in with their schedule. Consequently, because they are being involved in the process of developing the product or service, it starts to re- personalise their relationship with the advertiser and their products.

This takes the consumer through the barrier of not wanting to address change and takes that compromise, the anxiety and worry that perhaps the decision was not the best or the right one, out of the equation.

In other words, there is no reason why they should not change from their usual brand in favour of this alternative that they have now learned, fulfils their needs better.

And this isn't this the ultimate market the advertiser is after - the people who use his competitors' products. Now the consumer can say, "Yes, I will change my behaviour and I have a very good reason or series of reasons why". They can adopt this position because they have a well-in-formed opinion or have developed an image of why that product is appropriate for their needs. Now the long silence - the industrial interruption of the human conversation is coming to an end. Paul Ashby pioneered interactive communication to the advertising and marketing communities some twenty-five years ago. The communication issues he addresses have been neglected during the explosive grown of advertising in the 60s, 70s and 80s, these are Cognitive Dissonance, Selective Retention and Selective Exposure.

Would you like to discover the incredible results to be attained by using interactive communication? Well these are revealed for FREE at http://effectiveaccountablecommunication.blogspot.com or contact Paul directly on paul.ashby@yahoo.com