Five emerging marketing channels founders can exploit now

Executive overview

Most ad platforms make you do the targeting work — but the real opportunity is platforms that bring pre-qualified customers to you. One-to-one communication at scale is the defining shift: every customer feeling individually addressed, like a restaurant regular. Five concrete channels represent where marketing leverage will come from.

The biggest opportunity is owning direct, personalised communication between businesses and their customers at scale.

Five future marketing opportunities

1. Demand-side targeting: Platforms should bring you pre-matched customers — you state the product, the network finds the buyer. Stop doing the segmentation yourself.
2. One-to-one communication at scale: Marketing automation lets you email or show different content to different users. The goal is every visitor feeling like a restaurant regular — known, personalised, not blasted.
3. Virtual reality advertising: VR social spaces (think Second Life meets Facebook) will carry ads — billboards, poster boards, branded environments. An early channel to watch.
4. Network exploitation: Major companies grew by piggybacking on existing networks — Airbnb on Craigslist, PayPal on eBay, Facebook on college mailing lists. Identify the next exploitable network: Reddit, WhatsApp, Meetup.
5. Business-to-consumer messaging: There is no clean, owned channel for companies to message customers individually at scale. Email lists are weak; Facebook Messenger is awkward. The gap is a real opportunity.