Ordinary Advertising

A number of people have told me I should read this article by James Cherkoff that appeared on the changethis.com site. The title of the piece is “What Is Open Source Marketing?”, and I finally got around to it.

As is almost de rigueur in articles on a mission to characterize the world as dramatically changing, Mr. Cherkoff opens with a rather sweeping statement. He claims that “Today’s consumer is unrecognizable from even just twenty years ago. More savvy, more skeptical, wealthier, better informed, less deferential and generally more in control.”

Is that so?

Much as I hate to admit it, I’m old enough to remember what consumers were like “twenty years ago”–circa 1985–and frankly, I question just about everything in this author’s opening salvo.

More savvy? Last time I looked people were still struggling to set the time on their DVD players just as they did with their VCRs lo those many years ago. And I just read about a recent study that showed that 55% of those “ever-so-savvier-than-thou” teenagers have a hard time navigating many websites.

More skeptical? More skeptical than the people who weathered Watergate and the Vietnam War? Less deferential than the people who first embraced Saturday Night Live and David Letterman?

Wealthier? Maybe in aggregate, but according to the behavioral economists I read, people don’t feel any better off today than they did 50 years ago, let along 20, because that’s a function of how your wealth stacks up against the wealth of those around you.

But speaking of wealth, I’d like to have a dollar for every time a statement like “today’s consumer is unrecognizable” has appeared since 1995, 1985, 1975 or whenever the Crimean War ended. Honestly, it’s quite amazing how consumers keep making these quantum leaps in sophistication every decade or so while simultaneously rewarding “The Apprentice” with their undivided attention.

Yet, where Mr. Cherkoff is heading with all this is to advise those of us in the marketing world to accept and even welcome the fact that all these Rhodes scholars of consumption will soon be pitching in their ideas for how to develop more effective marketing communications via blogs and whatnot. That’s the essence of “open source marketing.” In fact, he comes right out and says “Weblogs are the star of the show. Pubsub, an online blog monitor in the U.S. estimates that more than 24 million were launched in 2004 and expects continued exponential growth.”

Now I’m no math whiz, but as I recall, an exponent is usually a power of ten. Whcih means if 24 million blogs were launched last year, the next stop on the bullet train of babble will be 240 million blogs, or one for every U.S. resident over the age of 12. All of which reminds me of the old question: “Could a million monkeys typing on a million keyboards for a million years produce Shakespeare?” The answer being “no”. The permutation of letters, characters, motivations, stage directions and ideas in just one of William’s plays are simply too vast.

But this shouldn’t be construed to suggest I’m categorically opposed to open source anything. Clearly, open source has been a tremendous tool for enhancing computer code. However, I’d argue that’s because computer code can be fully revealed whereas the “code” that produce extraordinary advertising ideas is hidden away in peoples’ heads. Talented people, I should add, not all people.

So I think we can take a collective deep breath and stop worrying that Coke is going to post its next ad brief on the internet and trigger some global, blog-enabled, gang bang. Certain acts–sex (or so your partner tells you) and making advertising will generally yield the most satisfying results when just a couple of people go to it.