In his post The customer as god, Nic Brisbourne of the investment firm DFJ Esprit shows how he is both a smart and a patient man. He was smart to get hip to VRM three years ago…
Back in 2008-09 I wrote a few posts about Vendor Relationship Management (VRM), a conceptual framework for improving the customer experience of being advertised to which turns the traditional advertising model on its head by putting the customer in control of the adverts they see. In theory this should be better for everyone – the customer only sees ads that are relevant to things they want to buy or do, and the advertiser can avoids the waste of advertising to people who aren’t interested in their product.
Doc Searls and the other proponents of VRM have sketched out a technical architecture for the services that are required to make this vision a reality, the most important element of which is a personal datastore for each consumer which tells advertisers which products and services they are allowed to advertise. The datastore contains rich profile information which is valuable for advertisers, but the contents and access to the datastore are controlled by the consumer, who may choose to see no ads at all.
And he’s been patient waiting for developers to get their collective acts together…
I stopped writing about VRM in 2009 when it became clear that the practical challenges to implementing VRM were such that we were unlikely to see any successful startups in this area in the short term. I think the biggest challenge is getting consumers to engage with the concept, both by contributing to a personal datastore and then by updating their preferences so advertisers know what they might want to buy. For a service to work the data needs to be captured and the preferences inferred without any effort from the consumer, and to my knowledge nobody has found a way to do that.
I still believe in this vision of the future though. It is much more efficient than today’s advertising which, despite much improved targeting, is still mostly irrelevant to the consumer and increasingly simply not seen.
I’m writing about this now because I just read an interview with Doc Searls about his new book, The Intention Economy. The interview is a good reminder of the problems with the existing advertising system and how things will look different in the future. As I say, I still believe in the vision of VRM, but equally the path that gets us there still isn’t clear.
And, as an investor, he’s putting some clarifying bait on the table:
I think developments in smartphones and intelligent agents are bringing us closer to the point when that clarity will arrive though, and I’d be happy to hear from any startups working in this area.
Okay, so here is a list of VRM developers and projects. Who is going to step up?