Why is it that marketing drives people to deface community wikis? To spend their time and attention writing bots to infest Twitter and Facebook and social media generally with artificial “friends”? To hire Indian folks to call me during dinner and pretend to be “Gertrude” or “Molly”? To do that often enough that there is a law against it now, a Do Not Call Registry? To eat 30% of my television time, splattering multiple channels with thousands of copies of the same stupid air-freshener ad every night? What makes engineering professors set up spam blogs full of Markov gibberish to try to game their professional organization’s Google pagerank? Why do algorithms compose and send out the majority of all emails actually sent in the world?
Think about it. I’ll be you are disturbed by or even hate those things, every time they happen to you. Even if you’re one of the people in the marketing business.
Advertising can be subtle, and beautiful. It can be a conversation, a thoughtful image. It can be pleasant, sought-after, a testimonial to the product. It can be polite, opt-in, and complementary.
What makes this other lifestyle viable, the one that we hate? What economic or cultural norm, what law, what incentive exists to make it feasible for otherwise decent human beings to consider costs and benefits and opt to act that way?
That thing, whatever it is, is our enemy.
With few exceptions, I note that it isn’t human beings who are being marketed. It doesn’t seem to be people with names who have ads, spam, phone calls—as long as we count celebrities as non-people (or meta-people). As brands, say.
Maybe that’s a clue.
Bill, I’m willing to bet that “that thing” stems from a combination of several different factors such as pressure to scale marketing efforts, pressure to perform in the short term and the sense of “how things are.” Subtle, beautiful advertising can be challenging to create, provide a lot of value and command a premium. If those with P/L responsibilities can game the system and provide satisfactory results without spending big $$$ on amazing advertising, what incentive do they have to do so? Social media presents the possibility of new, intriguing advertising paradigms. I just hope that quality content will continue to be rewarded.
Subtle, beautiful advertising is, at the core, what Leonardo da Vinci did for his patrons by putting them in his paintings and making them popes and saints. What Jim Henson and Dr. Suess made for a living before their works became autonomously useful. What N. C. Wyeth did, Normal Rockwell, thousands of others. And so we know their names.
I think, though, that the sentiment, growing among marketers, of, “What can we do to take advantage of these new modalities and media?” is going to rapidly be replaced by, “Oh shit. We’re dead. Anybody can do what we do.”
I suppose that I’m feeling drawn to cause, in my own predictable way, the disintermediation of broadcasting advertisers and marketers. To accelerate the race to the bottom.
The three people I sit with at the coffee shop every Wednesday morning can create better, more beautiful, more effective branding and marketing and advertising campaigns—for the cost of one beer—than any of the marketing companies I know of here in town. We have all the equipage: analytics, design sensibility, communication tools. Expansive, diverse, and remarkably influential social networks.
Imagine what we might do if somebody paid us… 10%? 25%? of what the old guard charge. And if we really gave a damn. And if we had a real chip on our shoulders.
It’s not just me, surely. There must be thousands out there who aren’t just ignoring the most egregious abuses of public commons. So there’s a Tragedy of the Commons pointing its barrels straight at the wallets of traditional marketing and advertising: their only possible future is word of mouth, of building some kind of authentic reputation.
But even if one could sap all the meaning and value (and profit) out of direct and broadcast marketing and advertising, there remains the thing I’m concerned with: brand.
I wonder what it would take to make “brand” an insult, the derogatory supercilious term it may well deserve to be. I wonder what social engineering might be done to make not just one, but all branding a joke.
Thinking now.…
I think that thing is a combination of things…
Repeated advertisement broadcasting, especially via TV and radio, is more than just for the hope of influencing buying decisions… it’s for defining “normal”… defining “reality” to the point of exclusion of alternatives, as time and attention are limited.
It also defines attitude. Imitation… learning how to act based on what we observe of those around us… is a very powerful behavioral force. Even if we don’t exactly see others using another product, if we believe others use the product, we are more likely to follow suit and think this is normal.
The wiki defacement and spam are probably a result of a particular cost/benefit trade-off. Social norms present in meat space don’t hold as much behavioral influence due to the anonymity it affords, whereas the cost of producing and transmitting those messages is minimal. This has the potential to change as the popularity of social networks grow. Perhaps as the phenomenon spreads, it could be useful for building reputations, but even that could be gamed and is not a silver bullet solution.