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to price cars lower to sell more quickly so they would spend less on advertising. His research proved his theory wrong. Newspaper advertisers marked up their cars over Kelly Blue Book by 0.423 percent whereas craigslisters marked up theirs by 0.042 percent—a fraction. You might see this differential alone as motive to buy ads: Advertise and you can charge more. But I chalk this case up to a temporarily imperfect market, assuming that sellers who advertised were cagey and knew to ask for more, whereas craigslisters may have been bad negotiators who didn’t know they could get more. As Google and craigslist push the market toward openness and transparency with more information and greater pricing competition, that alone will push prices down. Epstein’s hypothesis may one day come true: Advertisers won’t be able to afford to advertise and stay competitive.

Of course, there are still people who don’t know about your product, who won’t know to search for it because it is new or they are uninformed. In the classic case for advertising, they also may not know they have the problem you solve. In 1919, the ad agency for the deodorant Odo-Ro-No invented the term “B.O.” and the insecurity around it. “Advertising,” said the trade journal Printers Ink, “helps to keep the masses dissatisfied with their mode of life, discontented with ugly things around them.” For good or bad, there will still be a role for advertising.

But mass marketing will no longer be the most efficient means of spreading a message. Competitors who learn to target customers—by relevance, not by content or demographics—will increase effectiveness and efficiency and lower their cost. Who has the leading relevance engine? It’s not mass-market TV (with its skippable ads). It’s not one-size-fits-all, shrinking newspapers. It’s not billboards on the road or on web sites. It’s Google.

Another reason to still advertise may be to burnish a brand, to help make it cooler because the ad is cool or it appears in a cool place. There is an ongoing debate in media whether brand advertising works online. Advertisers say they do not get the rub-off of branding on the web. They argue that online is a direct-response medium where countable clicks are king and mood can’t be conveyed in a banner people ignore. Media people try to convince advertisers that brand advertising does work online—because they charge more for branding and because they don’t want to be paid just on clicks. They’re both looking at the wrong issue. As The Cluetrain Manifesto observed, the internet is filled with human voices of friends and peers, so the artificial, institutional, huckster voice of brand advertising and sloganeering will increasingly be revealed as thin and false. Google’s simple, informative, relevant text ads ring truer.

The marketing that is left must evolve. Advertisers are starting to mouth the right words—it’s about relationships, not messages, I hear them say. In his 2001 book, Gonzo Marketing, Christopher Locke—another coauthor of Cluetrain—argued that “the fundamental message of marketing must change from ‘we want your money’ to ‘we share your interests.’ In this respect, corporate underwriting is a way—perhaps the only viable way at present—for companies to put their own money where their mouth is.” He urged companies to buy ads on relevant blogs—not as a way to distribute messages in banners, but as a way to underwrite blogs, as they would a PBS show. Sponsors say by their support that they share the interests and affections of the blog’s readers. Does that co-opt the blogger? It need not so long as the line between content and ad is clear. Locke also pushed companies to allow employees to blog so they could develop direct, helpful, and human relationships with customers. Robert Scoble, now head of FastCompany.TV, was the poster child for Locke’s argument when he blogged from inside Microsoft, in his own voice rather than that of the corporate Borg. He almost single-handedly turned around the reputation of even this company online. Your products and your customers are your ads, and so