Everywhere I look, messages from many brands compete for my gnat-like attention. Outside my house, Paramount plugs its summer film slate on larger-than-life billboards. On the radio, I hear ads to help me refinance the mortgage I don't have and purchase a car I'm not in the market for. The newspaper bombards me with ads for sofas, apparently unaware of the fact that I bought a new couch in January. And my TV, the master of all mass media, actually broadcasts hour-long infomercials on the theory that a 30-second spot is far more compelling than the content it sponsors.

From print, to radio, to outdoor, to TV, advertisers have me surrounded with the most diverse ad ecosystem known to man, but none of it is very good.

To call that ecosystem cluttered would be a massive understatement. The vast majority of those ads will be wasted on me, not because they're not good ads, but because I'm simply not the right audience.

For digital veterans, there's something almost heart-warming about the picture I've just painted. Digital, after all, is the efficient medium; it's where advertisers go to put the exact right message in front of the correct consumer and no one else. Digital is the promise of mass marketing reach combined with the specificity of a door-to-door salesman.

But enough of the sales pitch for digital.

The truth is that digital isn't nearly as close to that promise as you may think (or hope).

"We've only just begun to scratch the surface in terms of how we use all the data we're collecting," says Tim Vanderhook, CEO and co-founder of Specific Media.

I'm talking to Vanderhook for two reasons. First, as the boss at Specific Media, he knows a lot about the minutia of serving ads across the ever-expanding web. But I'm also talking to Vanderhook because one of his ads, a unit served on behalf of Netflix, seems to have locked on to me, and I want to know why.

Love the product, hate the ads
I've got a bone to pick with Netflix. The service is great, the price is right, and I often find myself saying things like, "Why can't my mobile carrier be as wonderful as Netflix?"

But there's one thing I hate about Netflix -- the ads.

It's not that it needs better creative or increased relevancy, it's that the ads seem to be following me, and there's nothing I can do to make them go away.

A little background
I've been a Netflix subscriber for nearly four months now. Despite the fact that it's a relatively minor purchase ($8.99 per month), I kicked the tires on the movie delivery service for more than a year. (Yeah, I'm the guy who blows the math on your sales funnel. Sorry.)

Sometime after completing a trial membership form, and sometime before actually joining Netflix, I began to see pop-under ads for the service. The ads, I reasoned, were part of a not-so-stealthy behavioral targeting campaign to induce me to do what my online behavior indicated I already wanted to do.

The ads may have prompted me to buy, or they may have had little effect. (That's a debate for another article.) But what I couldn't figure out was why, if targeting technology is so good, I was getting an ad for a product I already bought?

Does Netflix dedicate a chunk of its ad budget to annoying me after I do exactly what the company wants?

A word from the sponsor
At first I was a little worried that Vanderhook might not take too kindly to my questions. After all, I was basically calling to find out why Specific Media wouldn't leave me alone. But Vanderhook didn't take it personally, even though I clearly had.

Almost immediately Vanderhook said he knew where the ad came from.

"We're using Netflix as backfill," Vanderhook explains, pointing out that the mail-order movie house is one of the biggest buyers of advertising on the web. "We can figure out what you're interested in [but the problem is] that we don't always have the advertiser to match to your segment."

According to Vanderhook, we're in the midst of a sea change in online advertising. Where ad networks once fought tooth and nail to aggregate publishers and collect the billions of pieces of data floating out there, they are now shifting their focus to attracting big name advertisers.

For Vanderhook, who says Specific Media clocks more than 100 billion BT transactions in the average 30-day period, the challenge is marshalling an array of advertisers to meet any niche. It's a little like being a fisherman who brings in a little bit of everything, and Specific Media, like all other ad networks, needs relationships with all kinds of advertisers just as badly as it needs information about me and my friends.

But from a consumer perspective, the muddy ad network waters leave a lot to be desired.

Where I thought I was being targeted (poorly), Vanderhook claims I'm actually the recipient of a digital barrage. But it's actually a lot worse than it sounds.

Welcome to the nightmare
Like a lot of web users, I only visit a handful of sites on a regular basis. The digital media I consume consists of one part big portals (Yahoo is still the closest thing the web has to a town commons), one part search engine (I'll give you a hint, it starts with the letter "G") and two parts social networks (I vacillate between Facebook and MySpace). Beyond that, reaching me is a journey into a thousand little places. I won't mention the sites I visit because they really aren't all that noteworthy. They're small- and medium-sized publishers, and the only way to efficiently message to me in those places is to use ad networks.

But it turns out that I'm not really the recipient of hyper-targeted messaging customized just for me. I'm in control insofar as my online actions instruct the computers at companies like Specific Media that I would be interested in discount Dodgers tickets, the new Adam Corolla movie and ready-to-eat organic tofu. But according to Vanderhook, I'll always get the same Netflix message as long as there's a shortage of big name advertisers. And for now, that means that I see the same ad every single time I visit one of my top 10 websites, which means I effectively live in a world with only one ad. Talk about a boring, mind-numbing existence.

Another view
While Vanderhook insists the problem is a shortage of advertisers, not everyone familiar with the problem would agree.

Speaking anonymously, one veteran of a BT provider that was gobbled up by a major portal told me he agreed with Vanderhook that my tormentor likely wasn't a case of poorly executed targeting. But both men disagreed on the reasons.

While Vanderhook disagrees, this BT source and others in the industry point to a natural tension that exists between advertisers and ad networks. That tension means that some advertisers prefer to keep ad networks in the dark to drive down price. Although the extent to which advertisers and ad networks hide the ball from each other is unknown, the effects -- from a consumer perspective -- are apparent.

At the end of the day, an ad network is a meeting place for publishers, advertisers and users. But not all ad networks are created equally.

Ad network clutter
When you cover ad networks, it's easy to miss the forest through the trees. Writ large, the sector is probably best defined as ad networks, but within that space is a range of business models. There are some obvious differences like horizontal ad networks versus verticals. But that only scratches the surface. A recent Wall Street Journal article highlighted the growing confusion that has shaped the ad network space as media buyers struggle to tell one network from the next.

According to Robert Tas, CEO of Sportgenic, the plethora of business models that define the ad network space is so pronounced as to shatter the all-encompassing moniker of ad network.

"I have a lot of respect for Tim [Vanderhook] and Specific, but at the end of the day, we're just two totally different business models," Tas explains. "Our challenge is finding things that provide a value to all sides. When you go to one of our properties, you go there because you want to. These are communities that are part of who you are. We spend a lot of time doing the heavy lifting to create a high-end brand experience."

Sportgenic's tailored approach is a far cry from Specific's 100 billion monthly transactions reach play. Yet, both get lumped into the generic category of ad networks.

But while each business model certainly has its place, each must share the same turf to varying degrees. For a Sportgenic client, the goal may be to engage with a relatively small community of users. A typical Specific Media client may be looking to do just the opposite -- namely reach as many people as they can as often as they can without much concern for what people think.

The trouble comes about when users like me start asking questions. It only took me a few phone calls to figure out why I was being bombarded when I thought I was supposed to be getting laser-targeted messaging. I have a job and a rolodex that helps me figure out that a brand like Netflix simply isn't interested in having a conversation with me, whereas as a brand like Saab may want to fully engage with me as a member of the FitFiend.com community (the former serving as an example of a campaign executed on Specific, the latter one that has played on Sportgenic). But for most users, all of those attempts at messaging are simply filed away under nefarious terms like "tracking."

According to a recent report from eMarketer, 71 percent of internet users are aware that advertisers are using their online behavior to tailor messaging to them, but only 41 percent of users report being familiar with the term "behavioral targeting." Presumably, only a fraction of internet users actually understand what goes into behavioral targeting. But that didn't stop more than half of those surveyed -- 57 percent to be exact -- from stating that they were "uncomfortable" with the practice.

So what does all this mean? If you're an advertiser, it means that a cluttered media environment may be a lot worse than you thought. Consider the typical user who bounces from a handful of big-name sites to the smaller publishers that have to rely on ad networks. If that user finds himself as a regular visitor to a site that Netflix has deemed a dumping ground, he's going to get pummeled -- and maybe that's a good thing (for Netflix).

But when he goes to a smaller site sponsored by an advertiser that's interested in participating in his community, it's not clear that he'll easily be able to switch gears and have a conversation with a brand. His guard is up, and he's probably a lot less likely to want to hear a message tailored to him because he just came from a place that bombarded him with messages that weren't for him.

Unfortunately, there's no easy solution here. It seems certain that the internet can offer the reach play, if only Vanderhook et al manage to attract the big-name advertisers. But the internet is also the best medium in the history of media for hyper-engagement in the demographic niches users really define themselves by.

The question, it seems, is whether advertisers can have both without driving users away from sponsored content altogether. Or, put another way, can you yell irrelevant messages at me one minute and then sit down to talk politely about a topic of my choosing the next?

Michael Estrin is associate editor at iMediaConnection.