There’s a great joke, made duly famous by David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, that goes like this: Two young fish meet an older fish swimming the other way. “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” he says. And one of the young fish turns to the other and says, “What the hell is water?”
In media, advertising is water. It’s the thing for-profit journalism needs to survive. More than that, for both consumers and producers of media, it’s the thing that’s all around us, which we’re intuitively processing without fully contemplating. Thousands of companies and entire multi-billion-dollar industries would not exist unless other companies were desperate to print their names in front of their audiences in exchange for money. If mobile apps are the future of technology, then the future of technology depends in no small part on the future of advertising.
