I was recently having breakfast with a Venture Capitalist who said that he wouldn’t invest in any web2.0 company that had an advertising based business model. I can’t blame him. It frankly amazes me that so much of the web is run on advertising right now.

My personal sense is that advertising has become part of the background noise of my life – cut out when it can be, and ignored when it can’t be cut out. I watch TV, but almost never live, so I don’t watch TV adverts. Google splashes stuff on my Gmail screen, I never click on it – not rarely – NEVER. The tube I get to work in the morning has ads all over the place, I wish they had more maps, but I don’t buy what they’re selling. I sometimes listen to commercial radio, they mostly seem to have ads about buying ads – recursively funny, but I’m not buying that either.

Is this a generational thing? Are the digital natives (and early settlers like me) just screening this stuff out of their lives? Who are the suckers that are responding to this stuff, and providing the data to show that those advertising $s are working?

I’d like to make it clear that I’m not saying that people don’t respond to brands. I’m just as much of a brand sucker as the next guy. It’s just that I don’t see advertising as being as much of a factor in building a brand and extolling its values as the industry would like to have us believe.