“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.

A new study, “Americans Reject Tailored Advertising,” conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkley, reveals that people care more about their privacy than getting targeted ads. I won’t go through all their findings (if want to read the whole study, you can download a PDF here), but here are two key conclusions:

• “Contrary to what many marketers claim, most adult Americans (66%) do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests. Moreover, when Americans are informed of three common ways that marketers gather data about people in order to tailor ads, even higher percentages – between 73% and 86% – say they would not want such advertising.”

• “Contrary to consistent assertions of marketers, young adults have as strong an aversion to being followed across websites and offline (for example, in stores) as do older adults. 86% of young adults say they don’t want tailored advertising if it is the result of following their behavior on websites other than one they are visiting, and 90% of them reject it if it is the result of following what they do offline.”

At the heart of all this is the practice of behavioral tracking. You might already know about behavioral tracking, but for those of you who don’t, here’s a brief overview: Behavioral tracking is, quite simply, gathering information about what individual consumers do online and offline to better understand their buying habits so that they can be targeted with specific ads that will (based on past behaviors) appeal to them. Websites do this by placing cookies on your computer every time you open a new page or something on a page – an article, an ad, whatever. They keep track of what you’re interested in and then suggest similar things or show you ads for things you might want. Advertising networks do much the same thing, but they track you across multiple sites. Retail stores track you through frequent shopper cards. (So when you get coupons on the back of your receipt, they’re for products the store knows you’ll probably buy because you’ve bought them before.) And now, with giant computer data bases, all this information can be brought together so the companies who want to sell you things can know exactly what you’re likely to buy and can market those things directly to you.

If all that sounds a little scary, it’s because it is, and when people find out it’s going on, most of them don’t like it. Here are a few more facts from the study:

• “69% of American adul                                                                                                                                                                                                        ts feel there should be a law that gives people the right to know everything that a website knows about them.”

• “92% agree there should be a law that requires ‘websites and advertising companies to delete all stored information about an individual, if requested to do so.’”

• “63% believe advertisers should be required by law to immediately delete information about their internet activity.”

• “Americans mistakenly believe that current government laws restrict companies from selling wide-ranging data about them.”

That last fact is especially important. People think there are laws in place to protect their privacy – but there aren’t. Everything we do on the internet and everything we purchase using frequent shopper cards is, for the most part, available to anyone who wants to buy it. As they put it in the study: “Generally, companies have virtually free rein to use data in the U.S. for business purposes without their customers’ knowledge or consent. Websites and stores can therefore easily buy and sell information on valued visitors with the intention of merging behavioral with demographic and geographic data in ways that will create social categories that advertisers covet and target with ads tailored to them or people like them.” In other words, BigBrother.com is watching, and wants to sell you the perfect pair of shoes to match the purse you just bought.

So how is this going to save mass marketing? Well, maybe it isn’t, but consider this—What if people start asking for these laws—the ones they think already exist—to be enacted? Laws that require websites to notify users that they are being tracked and give them the option not to be. Laws that prevent the information gathered from being bought and sold to anyone. Laws that keep what we buy and where we buy it and what articles we read and what websites we visit private, as people think they should be. Those laws would make behavioral tracking and targeted marketing much more difficult and much less efficient. And all it will take is a little more awareness on the part of the public and a few complaints to our lawmakers, and those laws could easily end up on the books.

Soon we may find ourselves right back where we used to be—marketing to everyone instead of just a select few because, it turns out, people like to hear a lot of messages and decide for themselves which ones they want to pay attention to. Which is, I think, beneficial in the long run to the companies doing the advertising. After all, if these companies keep marketing to the customers they already have over and over, how are they ever going to get new customers? Yes, the downside of mass marketing is that you end up talking to a lot of people who aren’t interested in your product. But the upside is that you end up getting a lot of people interested who otherwise might not be, and that’s how companies grow. So let’s not write off mass marketing just yet. Bob Garfield is a smart guy, but smart guys have been wrong before.