Feeding ads directly

RSS feeds may be the key to a whole new era of direct marketing, DM News notes, pointing out several advantages over venerable e-mail:

No known major Internet service provider blocks RSS transmissions. So with RSS, a marketer can rest assured that a new message posted to a Web page is automatically sent to every consumer with an RSS subscription to that Web site.

There are no ISP spam filters to get through. There are no stale e-mail addresses to worry about. And there are no cranky consumers complaining that they never subscribed to your marketing messages.

Plus, the RSS enclosure technology that makes podcasting possible will also let marketers distribute audio and video files to subscribers.

That holds major implications for more traditional mass advertising vehicles such as the Sunday paper, Terry Heaton notes at the Media Center's blog, Morph.