In his comment here, CT Moore says: “So maybe publishers need to stop thinking about how advertisers can target their readers and start thinking about how they can use their readers to target advertisers.”

I totally agree. Instead of publishers standing with advertisers and asking: “How can we help you reach all those eyeballs?” — publishers need to ask: “How can we leverage the buying power of our readers?” Here’s one way: retail flash mobs. Use the newspaper’s platform to aggregate reader’s retail demand. For example: Buying a refrigerator this Saturday at Sears? So are a hundred other readers of [insert name of local newspaper here]. To save $50 on a Kenmore fridge, wouldn’t you pay $30 to be a subscriber/member of your local paper?

This is part of the logic behind a project I launched in June. It’s called Society Matters http://www.societymatters.org , and it’s an attempt to convince the managers of the National Geographic Society that the future is not in soliciting more ads, but in networking the Society’s members (which is declining).

Just think: more than four million members, many of whom love photography. They are the target for the camera ads that Canon pays handsomely to display in the National Geographic Magazine. Why not turn this model around and aggregate their demand for photo gear? Why not help hordes of people buy the equipment to be “citizen journalists” — and then organize their creative contributions into crowdsourced stories? or into local photojournalism clubs? or into a new publishing business that says: “We know the line between amateur photographers and the pros is narrowing. But we don’t want to horde our power and authority—we want to spread it around to you, our members.”

Why couldn’t this work?

Read about the CueCat history here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

Regardless of whether it’s RFID in the “reader” or the CueCat’s bar code reader, you still seem to be requiring new hardware just to scan a few ads. Unless this hardware capability can be incorporated in the next iPhone, you’ll likely find customers unwilling to carry another limited-use gadget – just as they refused a decade ago.

A tikitag RFID chip? Really? I’m going to buy a piece of hardware so that I can scan a print ad to see more ads?

Expandable ads? Right, because I love road-blocks so much that I’m going to put them up myself…

Maybe the problem is that everyone is still thinking in terms of “advertising” instead of “marketing.” I mean, “advertising is what happened when we were blind, when all we had to go on was imperfect information and educated guesses about the audiences, and physical spaces to use. But content… content is now dynamic. It exists in real-time in the stream, and publishers (if they’re smart, if they’re strategic) can actually amass more practical information about their audience than some government agencies. I mean, the smart-ones, the strategic publishers have so much information that they have to hire database-miners!

So maybe publishers need to stop thinking about how advertisers can target their readers and start thinking about how they can use their readers to target advertisers.