When I think about the future of advertising, I think about Tom Cruise as John Anderton in Minority Report, striding through the mall being advertised to by the likes of Lexus and Bvlgari in an extremely targeted fashion. The future of marketing was meant to be focused, shiny, relevant and perhaps a little creepy. It has been 10 years since Minority Report, and digital advertising remains largely terrible.

Look at the web. Banner ads are ignored because of their irrelevance; websites aren’t personalized to our profiles or online commerce activities; e-mail marketing is a spam-fest bastion for the bottom feeders.  Only newer forms of inbound content marketing are tempering our distaste for web marketers. We can thank the amazing HubSpot for classing the biz up a bit.

Mobile marketing? Don’t get me started. We all love these beautiful, functional devices that brilliant product companies like Apple and Samsung put in our hands. And then marketers defile them with stuff like this?

Mis-sized, untargeted, irrelevant. I have Netflix on my Nexus 7, so why the crappy ad? Tsk tsk, Netflix. With your massive marketing budget and recommendation engine savvy, we expected so much more.

The future has betrayed us, again.

Despite best efforts by true technology companies, a status quo of qualitatively driven marketers has maintained control over corporate digital advertising budgets like Smaug in his mountain. It is estimated that the digital advertising hoard is a $60 billion business and growing. The antipathy for the quantitative richness of the web and mobile media means that budgets remain largely unattached to actual return on investment metrics.

At the Dx3 conference in Toronto last week, the sheen and pomp of the digital advertising business was on full display. Pastel and fancy socks with a dose of everything swaggy. (Disclosure: I hate swag.) The trade show itself was populated by digital marketing companies that are a hold-over from a time when marketing was all about look and feel. Though these companies use terms like eCPM, demand-side platform, real-time bidding and performance advertising, they are still essentially using lip gloss to sell product.

I gleaned one extremely valuable glimpse of the future at Dx3: the entire digital advertising business will be disrupted. The disruptors will include companies such as addictive mobility, Chango, LeadSift and DataXu.  Each employs core technology to improve advertising effectiveness.

There is now a tremendous opportunity for companies that bring advanced data analytics and core technology to solve targeting and engagement problems in digital marketing.  The volume and quality of data being generated by individuals online and via mobile is astounding.  Winning companies will compile and analyze data across fragmented platforms, between the online and offline worlds, to create valuable propositions for brands, retailers and customers.

In Minority Report, individual identities and profiles were ubiquitously known by corporations that could serve timely, targeted and contextually-rich advertisements.  The incumbents of the digital advertising world don’t have the chops to pull this off, but the coming generation of advertising technocrats will.

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Thomas Rankin is the investment director at Innovacorp, a Halifax-based early-stage venture capital fund making investments in internet, mobile, cleantech and life sciences. He tweets @rankinthomas and blogs at impossibleconfidence.com. 

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