I had a great conversation with Jeff Martin from 360cities yesterday about marketers being “evil scumbags”. And I agree there’s a good reason to harbor anger toward advertising and marketing: in most cases, marketers are trying as hard as they can to first get your attention and second part you from your money. This immediately sets up an aggravating dynamic that must be overcome.

In light of this, it surprises me how people love to celebrate super bowl commercials. Or willingly show each other GEICO ads and forward ads to each other through email. How is it possible that some how, some way, these supposedly detested people have somehow made a sales pitch into an enjoyable event?

Ads these days are like short comedy shows/sketches, and the line between large budget advertising and pure entertainment is blurring more and more. If you think about how most online ad-driven revenue models work, it’s generally either to preroll an ad before allowing access to content or some kind of impression-based display marketing where ads are shown alongside the content. And ad placement, both stealthy and celebratory is commonplace in entertainment.

Each stage of the evolution of marketing has been manipulated by various factors. In a era of simple trade, marketing was marked by direct interaction, tenuous accountability and very small scale. You had to stand face to face with your buyer and convince them you had great value quickly. This led to snake oil sales and other such confidence tricks. With mass production and then various media playing roles in society, marketing became very indirect, more accountable and large scale. The way I see it for the consumer this was a step sideways. The benefits of broadcast marketing led to more information, but now the consumer had no way to directly respond to the product. There was no direct feedback loop other than long sales cycles and response data was both indirect and difficult to apply.

When we finally started having ratings on TV and consumer advocacy groups like consumer reports we could start to measure customer satisfaction and increase some accountability.

Today of course we have more data than we can consume easily. Entire businesses are dedicated to harvesting this data and giving you visibility into spend-profit ratios, customer response rates and how to balance spend along different channels. This, coinciding with social media is not only changing marketing, but *changing the kinds of people involved in marketing*.

As I said before, adding in the broadcast medium removed the direct quality of the producer-customer relationship. How would it be possible to engage so many people on the same scale as production? Thanks to social media and other online services, customers are finding ways to get the producer’s attention, interacting with them, and getting a chance to broadcast their feedback back out to the world with the same power as the producers have traditionally had.

In the world of one-way conversations like radio and television, manipulation, slickness and style are tantamount. Marketing *has* to be a show and therefore needs actors. But, in the *two-way conversation* accountability and directness are brought to the forefront at the large scale. Consumers have many new ways they can now join the marketing conversation. And who would willingly engage with a slick, “evil scumbag” in a two-way conversation? Style and show without substance mean very little on twitter.

In this next marketing evolution I believe we’ll see at least some shifting away from advertising/marketing content that has little to do with the product other than attempting to make us laugh or feel good or simply just get our attention. That is because the new marketer must have two qualities that were never necessary before: the ability to manage large amounts data and a great product that can they can stand next to proudly for all the world to see.

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