What IS the Future of Advertising?

I read an interesting post recently on www.widgify.com on "The Future of Viral Marketing: Service-Oriented Advertising." The author proposes:

I call this concept Service-Oriented Advertising. People will pay to have their messages delivered across services.  It’s a bit geek-shique, but the idea is that marketers will seed the delivery of their message through multiple web services, or channels, and pay for the enhanced distribution of their messages on a performance basis.  There are some primitive versions of this that exist today.  The CPI, or cost-per-install, model for widgets is a subset of this paradigm.  People pay for their message (widget) to get distributed across a subset of channels (social networks) on a performance basis (install on a page).

It's been a mantra over the last several years (with philosophical underpinnings from the Cluetrain Manifesto) that marketing must morph into a conversation, a collaboration between vendors and their constituents/customers. While many companies still react with "Huh?", others are blazing trails on what exactly this looks like.

The conversational approach has great emotional appeal, but marketers have struggled with how to measure it, how to manage it and how to profit from it.

Whether it looks like the "pay for propagate" model as Hooman suggests, I'm not sure. But as word-of-mouth influence continues to challenge television and traditional media as THE source for new product/service information, it's clear that rallying your tribe is of utmost strategic importance.

The keys seem to be:

• Is your tribe made up of the right people?
• Is your tribe truly influencing people down the purchase funnel?
• Is managing the tribe really more efficient and effective than traditional marketing?
• Can you convince your boss of all the above?