Getting marketing messages through to the consumer is more difficult by the day. I believe subscriptions for subscription-based ad-free social media are just moments away. Clarity of importance is the new key. Reach will replace frequency in the new dawn of marketing. With limited opportunities to persuade the customer, advertising MUST become less about entertainment and more about the importance to the prospect.

In the end, it is a healthy change. Only the fit will survive and many of the so-called creative advertising agencies will go away (thankfully). Advertising has always been about commerce, not entertainment.

In principle, this is a potential solution to decreasing ad effectiveness, but it has limited scalability. Facebook, ESPN and some other high-repeat traffic websites can offer an option like this, but most of the web cannot. Newspapers have put up paywalls yet it hasn’t been a true solution to maximize revenue.

I really doubt most Facebook users are the type that will pay for a subscription when they’re already practiced at tuning out ads. And if hundreds of destination websites are adopting this kind of a model, how many people are going to pay for multiple subscriptions? Plus enough implementation of this model will drive a wedge between advertisers and destination websites whereby advertisers might look for alternative marketing avenues.

The thing I question is, how do we find out about new products and services without ads? Yes we can discover them if we walk into a store, however many consumers need a reason to walk into that store.

Subscription services will certainly work for some channels but certainly not for all so it goes back to, how do we make ads not ads? Let’s think about the Super Bowl for a minute. I am football-intolerant but I do watch the ads because they are great. They are entertainment. Also, there is great opportunity for on-air placement advertising.

My Millennial nieces and nephews who stream their favorite shows can still tell me the hottest ads. How is that? It’s all about giving the consumer what they want now, isn’t it?

For my 2 cents.

We should first go back and look more carefully at what motivated the ad blockers. In particular, note that the era of hyper-targeting is exactly when consumers got entirely fed up and started dashing to ad blockers in mass quantities. In other words: when advertisers crossed the line and became creepy in their invasiveness.

That said, I don’t envision any way that a subscription model ends up working. In fact, digital efforts have tried this approach for a couple decades and it never sticks because consumers don’t want it. In 2000 I remember lots of dotcoms (some we created advertising for) shouting loudly about “ad free” or about “free if you’ll just put up with our ads.” Neither worked.

The only solution is for advertisers to get real and stop buying into digital ideas that offend consumers. Create advertising that is valuable, not invasive and speaks to issues consumers generally care about and consumers won’t have a problem with the advertising.

Up until now, advertising played an important role in making content — particularly news content — available and accessible to the masses. Technology has disrupted the content’s relationship with consumers and there are many implications to consider — new revenue models for publishers are just the tip of the iceberg.

No company wants its marketing to be inflicted upon customers as a type of punishment through which the have-nots of the world suffer. Not a lucrative business concept.

Now let’s be clear: Spotify Premium users are paying for more than an ad-free experience. Premium users have the ability to create their own playlists, listen to any song at any time and listen to playlists by Spotify which are curated to their music tastes. I’m a Premium subscriber, as are many of the cheapest people I know. Because when you have Premium, you never have to buy individual albums.

Any type of premium put on an ad-free experience had better come with enough personalized perks and content to make users fall in love with the platform, or it’s going to be a bad deal for platform owners and advertisers alike.

One of the magical ingredients of Facebook and other social media mainstays is the cost of entry for participation:

ZERO.

If gradations of pay-for-view FB appear, I have serious doubt if the masses will continue to bite.

I certainly agree that other media outlets have been successful with subscription models, but they also have compelling entertainment or content to warrant a subscriber’s investment. Most social media, I would argue, does not have that punch for the average participant.

In my view, the future of digital advertising rests in its inherent ability to be targeted and relevant. General “pop up” ads will always be considered an annoyance and will struggle to survive in digital media, but gleaning the right data from an online experience can lead to smartly understanding the consumer and their interests. Certainly there is much evidence that consumer profiling and targeting is already occurring with apparent success for advertisers.

As obstacles arise, advertisers invariably come up with solutions. I don’t see that changing in the immediate future. However, subscription models are definitely showing their advantages and I can definitely see innovative retailers making this work long-term with the right systems in place to manage the consumer data effectively.

The future of how advertising will be done is with both sponsored content and native ads inside content. It is already far down the path if you read sites like Business Insider or Huffington Post. And, as a company that uses this type of advertising, it is highly effective and less intrusive on the consumer. This type of advertising will allow the content to continue to be delivered without subscriptions. Although most content providers will have free and upgraded subscriptions where they provide a premium for the subscription package.