Traditional Mass marketing techniques are recognized as dead, even by many of the big players. They just take a long time to move in a diff. Once a people taste freedom, whether it be freedom of information or freedom of movement, life is never the same again. And the world is definately tasting a freedome of interactive information. That will create, IMHO, totally new social, political and economic paradigms we can only guess at today.
Marketers are motivators.
What motivates people changes as their needs, values, belief-systems and ideas of who they are, and what they are capable of doing changes. What's absurd is to suggest that the 'profile' of a consumer has not changed in the last 50 years, let alone the last 5,000. To miss Thomas's point here I think will doom any marketer on the web. Perhaps, with time, it would doom a marketer anywhere. This is a fake email address.