The cracks and crevices of the digital landscape can be goldmines for marketers, according to David Scott Carlick. But knowing where to look will require a radical rethink of the industry's economic model.

Old media met new media in one frenzied, disjointed speech from David Scott Carlick, a co-founder of DoubleClick and current managing director of VantagePoint Venture Partners, who bounced from incomplete thought to witty aside and in the process managed to illustrate his version of the internet's true advertising model.

What do racy photos on a woman's MySpace page have in common with a coupon for cheese at a local grocery store? For Carlick, the answer is simple: Pachinko Economics.

First, some background.

Pachinko is a Japanese game that challenges players to find patterns while sorting through hundreds of tiny balls simultaneously. While it has nothing to do with economics, Carlick said he sees the game as a model for what's happening online, with billions of microscopic conversations and transactions zooming by advertisers at lightening speed.

Perhaps cognizant of the speed with which the internet moves, Carlick never did define Pachinko or talk a lot about a new economic model. Instead, he gave attendees at the iMedia Breakthrough Summit in Rancho Mirage, Calif. a crash course in just a handful of the infinite numbers of things that are happening online.

Showing the crowd provocative pictures of a scantily clad woman on MySpace, Carlick mused that perhaps advertisers are several steps behind their users.

"You look at this sexy picture on MySpace and you think a brand could never sponsor that kind of content," Carlick said. "But I think that users are sophisticated enough to know that the ads are sponsoring the user, not the content."

To illustrate his point, Carlick displayed the page again, this time featuring an ad for bras. Drawing his point out further still, Carlick swapped out the bra ad for one promoting sex toys and then quickly followed it with a creative for religious salvation, saying that for some users a message for church might be perfectly matched against "sinful" content.

The key, according to Carlick, is that the user and the content stayed the same while the advertiser -- in this case Carlick playing devil's advocate -- monetized a page with a diversity of messaging that attempted to match the infinitely diverse audience marketers face on the internet.

Moving from the prurient to the practical, Carlick turned that audience's attention to cheese.

"You just know that right now some marketers for cheese are trying to figure out how to work in digital," Carlick said with a laugh. "They're talking about blogs on cheese and getting users to submit videos about cheese. But the truth is that the opportunity to market cheese online exists without those things."

For Carlick, the cheese problem may not be all that different from marketing bras. If users are likely to click on ads for bras when they see content that features a woman in her bra, they are just as likely to buy cheese when they're making out their grocery list.

While Carlick acknowledged that e-commerce grocery shopping hasn't had much success, he pointed out that advertising on websites for super markets makes a lot of sense.

Rather than taking over the front page of a foodie site or trying to launch a viral campaign around cheese, Carlick suggested that the consumer packaged goods marketers in the room investigate what grocery stores are doing online to better serve their customers.

"These stores are helping their customers make their grocery lists and they're sending them coupons along with reminders about what's missing in their pantry," Carlick said. "A smart marketer will be one who figures out how to put the cheese message deep into those sites during that tiny window where the user actually wants a message about cheese."

And that's where the Japanese ball game meets the economics of today's internet, according to Carlick.

"There are people out there who still want to make that easy mass audience buy," Carlick said. "But that's not what's really going on out there. What's happening online isn't that everyone is sitting around to hear the same message like they did with TV. Everyone is moving in a lot of different directions, and the marketers need to find ways to get into those smaller spaces where everything is really happening." 

Michael Estrin is associate editor at iMediaConnection. Read full bio.