Last month I sacrificed an entire weekend to start a Masters Certificate in Marketing Communications Management.  The first module covered such topics as internet advertising, new media channels, public relations, consumer promotions, sponsorship marketing and direct response marketing - topics that consume my every work day.

I figured there wasn’t much to learn…

Imagine my surprise when one guest speaker who claimed to have been part of the creative process that resulted in Tim Horton’s famous “roll up the rim” contest proclaimed this Internet thing was misleading, full of lies and largely ineffective as a communication channel.  Was he talking about television?  

Apparently not.

It led me to wonder if I had been led astray with this whole interactive marketing thing.

I remember being suspicious as far back as 1994.

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What does pornography and mass mediums have in common?

Where pornography goes, so goes the masses. 

Newspapers, magazines, radio, television & the VCR were all popularized once the adult industry adopted the channel as their own. 

The same could be said for the interweb.

In the early days of the Internet when Mosiac was the dominant web browser, I was building my first website on a Unix server using a student account allocated to me by Cornell University.  While I was learning basic HTML skills in Textpad,  the adult industry was building sites centered around their content. The joke back then was that every site on the world wide web was only 2 links away from an adult based website.  Although today’s sites require more than two degrees of separation to reach an adult content website, the impact of the adult industry on the interweb is certainly no joke.  

They same will be said for mobile. 

As reported by Reuters today, adult content on your mobile phone is coming to North America this year.  Although popular in Europe, Asia and other parts of the world already, this will be the first time that accessible mobile adult content has made it’s way to North America. 

With the adult content industry moving into the North American mobile space this year, it’s a sure sign that the masses will be shortly behind.