Eric Karjaluoto of SmashLab tells the story of a failed public relations endeavor, full of insults at his ideasonideas weblog. In short, a firm sent a boiler plate e-mail campaign without addressing Eric on a first name basis, and without what he calls “pull.” They pushed the message at him, instead of pulling him in.

In technological contexts, push results when data is sent to a user’s device without permission. Spam in your inbox is push. Most pop-up windows with advertising are push. Getting a text message on your phone about some wacky new 50 Cent ringer is push. Getting television advertisements shoved at you while you’re watching the Office or Project Runway is push. This represents a failure among the millions of dreary campaigns floating through our mediascape: too much push, not enough pull, not enough engagement. Unfortunately, this is just the beginning.

Of the many usergroups I belong to, it’s the iPhone developer group that sends me the most messages on a daily basis. I receive close to one hundred technical updates, queries, and job openings every 24 hours. When I first logged into the usergroup, I subscribed to the updates, in effect asking to pull the messages to my inbox. I can turn it off whenever I want, no different than a magazine or newspaper subscription. The usergroup itself is not push, but after reading the messages for almost a year now, I’ve learned that developers are up to something pushy.

A fraction of them want to use the iPhone’s GPS, whereby they send the phone’s location and identity to a database or administrator. When location-oriented computing meets push: (1) somebody will see where you’re at and (2) that somebody can effectively target their push. In the future, we may drive past a gas station and have our iPhone vibrate or ring, with a graphic displaying $0.79 Big Gulps, a 1 liter soft drink special with the purchase of any gas. Yes, cars already have the GPS infrastructure for this. Yes, your cable television provider does this too when they send you advertisements relative to your zip code. But your phone means everything to you.

We have our phones with us more often than we’re behind the steering wheel or in front of the television. Phones have become, and will continue to become pervasive. We use them at work, at home, during meals, and even in the bathroom. I’ve seen far too many teenagers exit stalls while still texting on their keypad. How do they even wipe? Neither bodily functions nor entertainment get in the way of our relationship with the phone. When I saw the Dark Knight in the movie theater, one audience member blogged through his iPhone to post a review as he watched the movie—in the dark.

Popular science fiction has predicted personalized advertisements, with Minority Report being the model that most of us fear: walking by the Gap, being measured by infrared, and learning about a sale item waiting for us on the rack; but hurry, it’s the last one. Those ambitious advertisements sit twenty years down the road, if that. But millions of mobile phones already sit in our pockets, purses, and belt holsters with GPS built in, and our browsing histories cached.

The future of advertising is right around the corner and it will be business as usual. Messages will get pushed at you, whether you like it or not, right into the phone in the palm of your hand. And if this idea gets you giddy with excitement, wait until embedded systems build the technology into your clothing, or worse, into the actual palm of your hand.

Oddly, the New York Times published this article (How to Save Local Newspapers: Cellphones) in its Technology blog while I was finalizing this piece for Speak Up. The NY Times writer illustrates how the mobile phone is getting more people to read the news. Read it for startling statistics, and learn about which newspapers outsource their mobile news.