Your role in consumers' lives is rapidly becoming obsolete. Here's what you need to do to save yourself and the industry.

If everything goes according to plan, Google will eventually completely replace marketing as we know it today. At least, that's what the internet giant's mission boils down to, says marketing entrepreneur Cindy Gallop. And, unless the industry wakes up and reads the writing on the wall, today's marketers may in the near future find themselves fading into obscurity, relics of a forgotten and no-longer-necessary craft.

Cindy Gallop.

Gallop, an industry consultant and former chairman of agency BBH US, isn't discouraging Google's objectives. Frankly, she has a great deal of respect for the company's stated mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. But the fact is that the advertising industry isn't evolving the way it needs to as technology giants such as Google -- and rivals Yahoo and Microsoft -- expand their capabilities and increasingly fulfill functions that were once key responsibilities of marketers.

"Our industry is jam-packed full of extremely bright, intelligent, creative, articulate people who spend all of that brightness, intelligence, creativity and articulacy, deployed 24/7, focusing on their clients' business," Gallop says. "They virtually never lift their noses from the grindstone and focus it on themselves and the industry at large. And I do believe that if more of the amazing talent in the industry had done so, we would have a new industry model for today, and the future of advertising would look very different from the way it does currently."

In the end, it all boils down to information -- and advertising's diminishing role in serving that information to consumers.

"Advertising started out as information delivery about brands and products, and in fact, it fulfilled that function for many years," Gallop says.

But today, that is no longer the case. According to Gallop, where consumers used to rely almost exclusively on marketing messages to familiarize themselves with products and brands, they now have countless reservoirs of information from which to drink with regard to any given item or issue. As conveyors of information, she believes marketers have lost their utility.

"The role of advertising in terms of providing information is not one that people need advertising to deliver on anymore," Gallop says. "I see a future where advertising becomes a very different concept. It becomes a question of no longer saying, but doing. Not telling, but being.

"Historically, advertising campaigns have had a beginning, middle and end," Gallop adds. "But the relationship with consumers is no longer linear in that respect." Gallop also thinks that every marketer today needs to build a more engaged relationship with their consumers -- or else, their consumers will find it very easy to bar them from their lives.

The key to marketing's salvation? According to Gallop, it's not necessarily a medium, and it's necessarily not a message. And it's not some yet-to-be-harnessed intangible floating out on the cutting edge of all things digital. Rather, it's the coming together of two halves of a whole: technology and creativity.

"I believe our industry hasn't even begun to leverage the possibilities inherent in that interface," Gallop says. "There tends to be, on the creativity side of the equation, a tremendous fear of the unknown, which is what the technology side represents. On the technology side, there tends to be a feeling of, 'Oh, over on the creativity side, they're all arty-farty, head in the clouds. They don't know anything, and we are the future.'"

In reality, the two sides not only complement each other -- they need each other, Gallop says. "I've been amazed at how, increasingly, what our industry does has been more and more undervalued," she says. "A lot of agencies have colluded in their own devaluation by allowing what we do to become commoditized."

Such a trend could be reversed by a meeting of the minds. She notes that she's met many technology developers who have produced products or concepts that have the potential to be very productive in the marketing world. What they lack, she notes, is an understanding of how to position their concepts in a way that is emotionally engaging to consumers -- an area in which their creative peers excel.

"I fundamentally believe we need to completely restructure how we operate in our industry," she says. "The currently siloed system is absolutely outmoded." 

Gallop says a collaborative approach in which technology and creative join together to reenvision how marketers engage consumers would move the industry a step closer to what she envisions as the future of marketing, which is best encapsulated in the concept of "web meets world." In short, the true impact of the web and online marketing efforts will ultimately be in how these activities organize people online to come together offline.

"There's a tendency, particularly for marketers who feel they're playing catch-up, to see the end-goal of digital marketing as something you achieve online," Gallop says. But in fact, she notes, successful marketing for the future will not be measured in page views or other online metrics -- it will be measured by what marketers can make happen in the real world via digital means.

Lori Luechtefeld is editor of iMedia Connection.