BUT
"Interactive" advertising agencies like www.schematic.com are picking up this business...and charging out the wazoo to develop very straightforward applications.
The new bottlenecks are the platforms that service the markets, networks, and communities that consumers [i.e. prosumers] connect on.
There is a lot of money to be made here.
Umair Haque at Bubblegeneration has a great analysis here:
"...for geeks, marketing, branding, advertising, etc are eeeeevil.
"The challenge, of course, is for geeks to understand that it's exactly this value equation they should be disrupting, not ignoring: making marketing, branding, advertising not evil.
"That they're evil doesn't mean you should ignore them - it means you should be destroying them and then redefining them: making them less about Madison Ave and BuzzAgent, and more about the deep 2.0 principles that in fact, are revolutionizing the deep economics of many industries - principles like peer production, gift economies, sharing, transparency, social capital, anticonsumption, and deep culture.
"Let me be a bit more blunt than I'd like to be: geeks (you too, VCs), this is your Next Big Thing - stop blowing it already.
http://www.bubblegeneration.com/2006/02/industry-note-great-...
I'm all over that. In fact, if I understand you correctly, you just made a case for my application to YC. Because I have several dormant startup attempts, I had a lot of sizzle and flash I could have chosen to present, but instead I went with something exactly like this.
I'd love to hear suggestions. I mean, custom web/product development is a great thing. You write some code with a business that you co-license the product with. So? Where am I writing a web app that I can apply to many different businesses? Where is this different than in-house promotional coding?
Like I said, I love the story. Just wish I could make something useful out of it.