To understand why take a look at the path between yourself and almost any purchase decision you make.

Everything starts with a desire.

You desire a thing, whether that thing is a book or food or a Z3. You want to find a way to sate that desire, so you go out in search of information. Sometimes that information comes from a television commercial or a banner ad you remember seeing that one time . . . but most of the times, what informs your buying decision either comes from habit or from someone you know and trust.

The way advertising, especially online advertising, works is that it inverts the purchasing process.

It’s based on disruption.

It looks for you while you’re ambling around without any particular desire in mind and has lights and sounds and colors jump out at you and try to make you want to buy something. Most of the time we forget or ignore these suggestions unless, of course, we already wanted to buy what they’re selling in the first place.

The implied conversion strategy of online advertising managers is to put creative in places that will maximize the odds that the person they are pitching will already want to buy what they’re selling, and that a glowing, flash banner will be enough to push them over the edge.

While effective, to an extent, it is woefully inefficient.

Let me posit a solution.

Let’s start by saying that I am a consumer of goods. I buy things and because of all of the habits I’ve collected over the years I buy certain types of things over others. When my friends ask me what to purchase, I can recommend products to them and since I’ve put my money where my mouth is, they are a lot more likely to take these recommendations seriously. For example, I read a lot of Science Fiction so my knowledge of Sci-Fi and particularly my knowledge of certain types of Science Fiction makes me the person you should ask about those kinds books.

With that in mind, what I need is a system that allows me to easily collect my own consumer behavior and lets me identify the brands that I like and use. More than a recommendation service, where I could pull a list out of thin air, this profile would be directly linked to me as an individual. When someone who trusts me (for whatever reason) wants to know about my consumption habits they can go to this page and see my ambient consumer behavior.

Imagine if you could find out what type of cameras an expert photographer uses or figure out the type of oil your buddy who is obsessed with cars puts in his.

Where do advertisers fit into this model?

That’s a semi-open question. What we would have is a way for advertisers to identify people who already care about their products. Breaking away from current endorsement models that seek to identify people who are “willing” to care in exchange for incentive, this would allow advertisers to approach people who have “opted in” as evangelists.

The most neurotic model they could apply at this point would be to try to sell these people more products or to try to get them to recommend these products to people more aggressively. You don’t ever want to turn your fans into your sales staff when you can help it. A more logical approach would be to reward and empower these “brand champions” for what they are currently doing. Just as many restaurants and airlines offer loyalty cards for frequent customers, brands could give loyalty based incentives for people who have chosen to identify themselves in this way.

The point here would be to work on building communities around actual consumer behavior. If I only buy Brand X’s computer and I have done so for years and I recommend Brand X to all of my friends, it would be in Brand X’s best interest to let me know that they appreciate my decision, to validate those decisions and to provide me with a sense of belonging to some broader community.

From the standpoint of a consumer, this system would let them see what the sentiment around a particular brand is. If you are looking for a computer, you can see how many people like that computer, who those people are, what they are saying about it, and how Brand X has established their community. More than just being able to see this information, you would be able to view it in one place without having to run through every microsite and Facebook fan page the brand is managing.

While this isn’t the plan that will fix all of advertising’s ills, with the industry flailing around hoping to pull itself out of broken paradigms it might be worth looking at things with new eyes.

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