“Mass marketing is doomed.” – Bob Garfield, author of The Chaos Scenario: Amid the Ruins of Mass Media, the Choice for Business is Stark: Listen or Perish, on NPR.

Bob Garfield talks and writes about marketing on NPR and in Advertising Age as well as a number of other media outlets, and he’s not alone in thinking that mass marketing is on the way out. In general, he and many others say that the internet, DVR, satellite radio and other new technologies will so fragment the audience that marketing to the masses will no longer make sense. After all, with targeted marketing you can spend a little to reach the 100,000 people who really want your product instead of spending a lot to reach 10,000,000 people and hoping the right 100,000 hear the message.

But do people really want advertising that’s geared toward them? Well, as it turns out, they don’t. Especially when the companies doing the targeting are tracking their customers’ online (and offline) activity in order to find and advertise specifically to them.