Wayne Campbell had this idea over 16 years ago
I have been wanting to right this article for a few weeks (er months) now. It has to do with the changing face of marketing especially around advertising. Particularly with how things get sold. The article which sparked my interest was actually written late last year and posted on Business Week. It is entitled: “A Modest Blogging Proposal” The article talks about a growing trend in the blogging world: “pay per post”. The idea being that a company can pay an important or well followed blogger to essentially influence readers by writing good things about a product or its company. In the early days of Social Media an idea like this was outlandish and preposterous. No good blogger would ever write anything that was either untrue or tainted simply to satisfy a sponsor.
In “The Tipping Point”, Malcolm Gladwell speaks of the power of influential people and challenges, that perhaps it is only a few influential people who “tip” the scales of modern day consumerism. He tells a a tale about Mavens, Connectors and Salesman and how they can control the most innocuous fads such as the growth of Hush Puppies as the trendiest of trends. His story and others like it have forced me to think about why we buy and how that has changed over the years.
Influences
We all have influences - the TV, the World wide web, magazines, radio, newspapers. They all play some sort of role in how we make decisions. Without marketing and advertising many of the products you buy (even consistent products) wouldn’t exist because you wouldn’t know about them. Those 10-15 pages in the front of almost every magazine with full page ads are there to influence our choices and display branded images that we can relate to. Without this form of advertising you would have to see a product in use or more likely you would have to hear about it from someone you knew.
A lot of how we buy however is influenced by other people: friends, families, co-workers. What if we erased marketing and advertising and didn’t have sites like Facebook, MySpace, Ning, Twitter and every other social network around (eek sounds like the dark ages to me). Without any marketing, advertising or social networking we would essentially be back to the way it was at the turn of the century, at least in the minds of a product owner. Consumers had little knowledge of anything outside their local network which if they were lucky stretched a few towns separated by a few miles at most.
What if we really did erase marketing and advertising? How would you even know that a product existed? Really, in a nut shell marketing and advertising is a few people (or companies) that decide which products and brands will sell. What if marketing and advertising wasn’t the only way you could find out about a product? What if we had a network of people (at our fingertips) that could help us make these decisions? At the turn of the century you could picture a few people riding from town to town with carts or wagons selling products that solved this problem or a new product you have never seen that could be used to clean dirt off a pan or your clothes (yikes another scary vision). But is that essentially where we are? Full circle? A few influencers using this new medium to distribute their ideas and thoughts?
Enter Social Media
The ultimate result of the debate spawned by the article “A Modest Blogging Proposal” was this:
…we came to the realization that few bloggers see any conflict in being paid to write a post, even if payment comes from the same company being reviewed.
Hmmm… bloggers who don’t make money on their blog turn to sponsorship by companies who can’t use traditional means like television and magazine advertising to sell products because nobody is listening. Hmmm…scary.
This is where I feel Wayne had us all beat - back in 1992:
Benjamin: Wayne! Listen, we need to have a talk about Vanderhoff. The fact is he’s the sponsor and you signed a contract guaranteeing him certain concessions, one of them being a spot on the show.
Wayne Campbell: [holding a Pizza Hut box] Well that’s where I see things just a little differently. Contract or no, I will not bow to any sponsor.
Benjamin: I’m sorry you feel that way, but basically it’s the nature of the beast.
Wayne Campbell: [holding a bag of Doritos] Maybe I’m wrong on this one, but for me, the beast doesn’t include selling out. Garth, you know what I’m talking about, right?
Garth Algar: [wearing Reebok wardrobe] It’s like people only do these things because they can get paid. And that’s just really sad.
Wayne Campbell: I can’t talk about it anymore; it’s giving me a headache.
Garth Algar: Here, take two of these!
[Dumps two Nuprin pills into Wayne's hand]
Wayne Campbell: Ah, Nuprin. Little. Yellow. Different.
Benjamin: Look, you can stay here in the big leagues and play by the rules, or you can go back to the farm club in Aurora. It’s your choice.
Wayne Campbell: [holding a can of Pepsi] Yes, and it’s the choice of a new generation.
In short, when you have 20K+ people listening to almost every word you say (like @davewiner, @scobleizer, @techcrunch, @guykawasaki and many others - http://www.twittown.com/friends/topfollowers_1 ) its hard to not imagine the above scenario.
Fortunately, I don’t see it quite like that. Sure you will see some of the people in that top list influence decisions (knowingly and unknowingly) and you may also see some of those people in that list take money for services rendered. But what you won’t see is the change in the fundamentals here: we are all connecting at an alarming rate using common platforms like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc…. and by connecting on these common platforms we are removing the need to rely on traditional means for purchasing decisions. Some will be swayed but the smarter ones will realize that there’s a choice. And that choice will come from trusted individuals in a wide circle of friends that have no geographic boundaries.