In light of this interview on Forbes.com that outlines Outsell Inc., prediction that

$65 billion will be siphoned away from traditional advertising channels in 2009 and spent instead on companies’ own Web sites and Internet marketing.

I thought it would be timely to resurrect and edit a post from wordpost.org, my other project—the higher edition of “Future Marketing: More Time Cost; Less Advert Cost” is as follow:

In a recent interview, Bob Hutchins and Greg Stielstra claim that demographics no longer rule the marketing roost, ideology does:

…there are no Facebook groups for traditional segments like women 25-54 or households making $75k+/yr. Instead, people define themselves according to their interests [...] which is why there are Facebook groups for Scrapbooking, Yoga, and fans of the Green Bay Packers.

All of this is exciting and scary for admission professionals. Just like it’s easy identify 25-54 women living in households that made $75k+/yr, but hard to know who’s an avid scapbooker. It’s easy to identify high school seniors, but it’s hard to know what drives their passions and their college decisions.

As affinity groups gain importance (and attention from marketers), there’s no doubt that permission marketing will conquer (thanks Seth Godin).

In other words, we have to start thinking about how to find a permissions base, how to grow it, and how to maintain it. The days of “blast an email to all high school juniors and see who responds” are numbered.

Of course, permission marketing is hard. Finding a base of prospects who want you to market to them, and then and engaging them enough to visit, apply, or enroll is tough. But it’s not impossible.

The internet has given us the ability to view behavioral trends and gain access to groups that we never could before.

I think permission marketing will force admission professionals to shift where we spend our marketing dollars.

Instead of shelling out big bucks for ads, we’ll invest in tools that allow us to listen more efficiently. We’ll also spend more time producing relevant content to add value to the online community.

This is a vision of the future that places more responsibility on colleges to put their prospective students and first so that enrollment goals will follow. It means that all of us will be responsible for creating and maintaining relationships with our prospects before we even look at enrollment numbers in the admission office. It means that we’ll spend more in time and less in materials.

So what do you think of this vision? Let me know.