Accountability. That’s where the rubber meets the road on the journey to NeoAdvertising. IAPIA has developed baseline metrics for audience engagement and brand awareness for the NeoAdNet tests done so far, and upon these two rocks we have begun to build our business premise: NeoAdvertising Sustains Brand Preference. Well, you didn’t think our motives were purely altruistic, did you? Of course not. We serve at the will of the Audience in service of the Brand. Therefore, now that we know we have something that can influence brand preference, the process of monetizing the business model can begun, full bore.

How does NeoAdvertising generate revenue? The obvious answer is sponsorship. The radical plan B is subscription. And way down in last place is content licensing.

All of these business models are based on a build-it-and-they-will-come basis. Which all boils down to capital, which is a non-existant concept at this point in time. So what comes first? The chicken or the NeoAdNet?

Well, we think the numbers have to come first. When we say, “Here it is. We have reinvented Advertising.” The response is going to be, “Oh yeah, you think so, huh? Well, prove it.” Clients, ad agencies, the press, our hairdressers, hell, everybody.

Proving it is not easy right now. The entire analytics thing has gone wacko. Multiple metric standards, click fraud, Neilsenophobia, you name it. It’s like a jungle in there. Nonetheless, we can’t build a business on “Trust us.” Or can we?

Look at Social Media. Despite millions of users, blinding analytics and all of the associated hype surrounding Facebook and microblogging site Twitter, marketers are failing to allot budget to advertising over social networks. Advertisers are not saying "We don’t trust you." They are saying "We have no idea in the world what to do with you."

Analyst group Forrester says that three quarters (yes, 75%) of marketers have committed less than $100,000 to social media targeting over the next 12 months. This year, Forrester expects 44% of Web users to visit a social network at least once a month during 2009 but predicts that advertising over that medium will be just 5% of total online ad budgets.

Both clients and agencies are afraid to get their feet wet in new media platforms. And the more complex these platforms become, the more clueless marketers become. It took my partner at IAPIA, Angela, more than a month just to understand the Twittisphere and its environs. Now she's looking to apply that knowledge to specific branding and marketing applications. Clients just don’t have that kind of time.

What traditional agencies fail to realize is that exponential growth can not be played catch-up to. When you are chasing a train doing 60 on a motorcycle, the train will not suddenly stop so that you have a more secure spot to land. It’s rolling, you're rolling… time to watch your step and hope for the best or kiss your sorry ass goodbye.

So the clients don’t have the time and the agencies are not smart enough to take the time. So they both go into denial that their traditional way of doing things has become null and void. So they spend money where it doesn’t work. And what does work they ignore, with hopes it will just dry up and go away.

That doesn’t leave much hope for a practice like NeoAdvertising to even be considered. So we obviously have to replace the entire outdated ecosystem with one of our own making and prove ourselves a better and better marketing investment as we grow better and better at engaging our audiences. The way to do that is to build a way of engaging people that is so compelling and so meaningful that they will feel a warm spot in their brain for the brand responsible for providing it.

Every day another brick.

NOTE: Will anybody out there who lives in the Chicago/Carbondale Area who would like to be involved in an IAPIA Project please drop us a note by clicking here.