Putting Wanted Ads in the Hands of Consumers

This advice from 5 Blogs Before Lunch got me thinking:

For all of the theories, and all of the advice, the best I can say is "follow the consumer. He'll tell you what he wants, and how he wants to learn about your product."

I remember a short while back, there was this device that you can use to record a short snippet of an unknown (to you) song on the radio, plug it in into your pc and their web service will tell you what's the song, singer and so on. From what I remember, it didn't do so well, that it did not really catch on (if anybody knows otherwise, please correct me on it).

How about a device that can have you aim and click on any item(clothes, furniture, cars, etc) in a sitcom or a movie, and have it either directly (sponsored by the product sponsor) tell you what it is and where you can get it (highlighting those closses to you) or do a search for all that offer that product, it could be an internet search through the likes of Google, Yahoo or Amazon for example.

The advantages of it:

• It does not interupt the consumer, in fact they choose when to interrupt or to be interrupted
• The consumer themselves are telling us what they are interested in/interested to learn more about
• With the permission of the consumer and through their directive, we provide them with relevant ads

What do you think?

Tags: Ads, Innovation, Permission, Marketing, Consumer, Ideas