Online Advertising Needs a New Direction

I've just read a wonderfully interesting article on TechCrunch: Why Advertising is Failing on the Internet. Inspiring stuff for my newly digital-ethnographic mind. Online advertising is fascinating to me because I think it harbours both amazing possibilities for advertisers and the online community and the dark side of modern life.
If it's done right it can entertain us, as a brief search on YouTube will show. (I love this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoRD1wmvwUc&feature=related.)
It can provide us with information we may actually need, which is why Search Marketing was so successful for such a long time. If I look for a "job site", ads form job sites are actually a good thing.
And it can save us money. If someone sends me a money off voucher or a discount code by mail, I may actually profit from it.
And yet many people (at times me included) have - to put it mildly - strong reservations against online advertising. I hate spam with a passion and have stopped using many a good app because of intrusive display ads. When I watch online videos, I keep 2 windows open to have something to do while the ads are running in the background just like I take a toilet break when the commercials come on TV.
All this is due to fundamental flaw in the way traditional advertising and it's poorly developed online cousins operate: It is disruptive. When I am watching TV or using my e-mail, I do not want some company forcing me to stop what I'm doing to listen what they have to say. It is rude and would not be tolerated in face-to-face interaction. Imagine you're in a restaurant chatting to your friends and a complete stranger walks up to the table and in a moment of silence blurts out: "Are you looking for cheaper car insurance?" It really wouldn't matter if you were, you'd not put up with him. I'd ignore him at best, but most likely would give him a piece of my mind. This is something I cannot do to obnoxious advertisers, which is a contributing factor to why I dislike them so much.
And for that very reason we have devised advertisement avoidance tools: Recording devices that let us skip TV ads, blocking software that filters it out on websites, spam filters etc. And let's not forget one of the reasons why Twitter is loved while Google, Facebook and others are met with increasing suspicion: They are not trying to turn users into consumers (something that was, according to one of my previous employers, online advertising's raison d'etre). They don't pester you with commercial rubbish. They don't interrupt your conversation.
Does that mean there is no advertising going on there? Far from it. But it has moved away from the outdated offline model of disrupting conversations to a model that is more suitable to the Web 2.0 and more gentle on the people it is trying to reach. (Sorry, I hate the term user.) So in my opinion the Internet will indeed destroy traditional advertising. But at the same time, it may actually open the doors to new forms of advertising that will finally manage to add value to the lives of its audience (whether by entertaining them, giving them information they need or saving them money) rather than just sustaining an industry that does not see eye to eye with them. They will have to learn to talk to us rather than at us. They will have to get involved in our lives rather than arrogantly assuming they can shape them to their liking. It's a brave new world and I can't wait to be part of it.