First off, if you haven’t seen Paul Isakson’s The Future of Advertising + Marketing, then do it. Now.

A recent post from Paul talks about how a former CD at Urban Outfitters is moving to Anomaly. The best stuff is towards the end when he says “As more and more advertising gets ignored, agencies have got to come up with better, more meaningful ways to help their clients reach and connect with people.” and then wraps it up with “Maybe the title of the post should have been, “The Future of Advertising Is More Than Communications.”

And speaking of communications, the Conversation Agent, Valeria Maltoni had a great post about RSS, Email, and the whole push vs. pull argument. She talks about how, “It is so much better when you have people sign up voluntarily, when they choose to pull your content and give you permission to occupy a space in their reader and day.”

Both are great ideas. Here’s where things get interesting:

In the middle.

If the future of advertising and marketing is more than communications, and the next step in communications is based on “pull”, then the future is a place where more than just communication is “pulled”. This could be design, production, interaction, delivery, or any other part of the process. All on demand.

How would things change if we could “pull” something like design, and get something how we wanted it, when we wanted it?

And despite what some people (get a job, hippies!) might say, it’s not really a bad thing.

If not for the advertising, I wouldn’t have remembered what day Grand Theft Auto IV was coming out. I’m almost positive I would have never discovered The Ting Tings without the newest iPod commercial (see below). It’s this element that usually goes unnoticed, but it’s actually the most important part.

I know that the point of advertising is to sell, but I think we’ve come to a point where it needs to be more that that. It needs to be useful. We’re here because people don’t want to see/read/hear ads. Think I’m lying? Check out the numbers of DVR and satellite radio owners. Ask the average person how they feel. It sure ain’t pretty.

So where does that leave us?

Well, a very tricky place, it seems. How do we pitch our product and provide value at the same time? Perhaps a change of priorities is in order. What would be really interesting is if we focused first on providing value to people, and also manage to get our product/service/company into the picture.

But hey, if that doesn’t work, we could always bombard people with as many ads as humanly possible and try to keep shouting until they can’t possibly ignore us anymore. That’s gonna work too right?