We are no longer your audience.

The web has changed us. #

We don’t want your adver­tise­ments. We don’t care about your sales pitch. We hate you for inter­rupt­ing our con­ver­sa­tions. #

If you don’t build it, we’ll build it our­selves. #

If you try to hide it from us, we’ll rip open the doors and take pic­tures. #

We go to web­sites that enter­tain us, that give us the infor­ma­tion we’re look­ing for with­out has­sling us and that treat us well. #

We use tools that help us do what we couldn’t do before. We cre­ate. We pub­lish. We con­nect. #

We share. #

We will spread the word about you if you lis­ten to us, trust us with your infor­ma­tion and let us be cre­ative with it. #

Open up. Don’t try to “gen­er­ate user con­tent.” Give us the keys. #

Let us in, and we will help you. Lock us out, and we’ll ignore you. #

And now that the web has become our main form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, we won’t bother with you on tele­vi­sion, in print, on the radio or on bill­boards unless you can be more like the web. #

Welcome to the Interactive Age. #

Stop try­ing to “reach” us with your “mes­sag­ing.” Give us some­thing to play with, to share or to talk about instead. #

Better yet, why not join us? #

4 Responses to ‘We are no longer your audience.’

  1. A pretty good man­i­festo. But in some ways stat­ing the obvi­ous. The trick is to take this some­where. Not sim­ply speak on behalf of con­sumer and chal­lenge the brand, but to show and guide the brand to ideas that will res­onate in this new age.

  2. Indeed. Though, if you think I’m stat­ing the obvi­ous, then you clearly get it. Unfortunately, in the mar­ket­ing world, that isn’t as com­mon as it should be.

    As I see it, TV as a medium allowed the mar­ket­ing indus­try to become what it is today. All of its biases, all of the lenses through which it looks at com­mu­ni­ca­tion is built around TV as the dom­i­nant form of pub­lic dis­course. TV has cer­tain biases, such as the imme­di­acy of vis­ceral emo­tional impact, which have guided the very notion of a brand.

    The indus­try has built struc­tures, mod­els and entire career cat­e­gories around the TV lens of the world. With the Internet, peo­ple are look­ing at the world with a whole new set of glasses.

    Where does this take the brand? In direc­tions that tra­di­tional agen­cies can’t be com­fort­able with (and to be fair that also goes for, gov­ern­ments, big busi­nesses and other large insti­tu­tions). Controlling the mes­sage is no longer an option.

    The brand becomes inter­ac­tive. Rather than some­thing that is com­mu­ni­cated with audi­ences, it becomes one hub at the cen­tre of a series of inter­con­nected networks.

    How does that work? That’s where things get a tiny bit more scary, espe­cially for peo­ple that are caught off guard by phe­nom­ena like Wikileaks or Anonymous or Bit Torrent sites.

    The brand adopts a cer­tain level of flex­i­bil­ity. It adapts as it makes dif­fer­ent kinds of con­nec­tions. It finds ways to take note of sig­nif­i­cant activ­ity within it’s net­work and responds on the fly.

    Vetting and cal­cu­lat­ing and test­ing and mea­sur­ing are done as you go instead of as a pre­con­di­tion for mov­ing forward.

    Branding, in short, becomes more like jazz and less like a metronome.

    And thanks so much for your com­ment. The fact that you “get it” is why I read your blog and fol­low you on Twitter. You often have a great deal of insight.

    And the fact that it has taken me this long to respond goes to show that my alter­na­tive to the agency model is a work in progress. If I had “staff” I wouldn’t have weeks at a time where I have no time to tend to the very thing I preach!

  3. I wholly agree with this. This is why I preach to my clients as well. I have never been one to “mar­keted at” as com­mer­cials and bill boards gen­er­ally offend my intel­lect. Quite bla­tanly. Don’t make me, as a mother, feel guilty for not using hard chem­i­cals to clean my coun­ters with.
    Don’t insult my intel­li­gence by plas­ter­ing a pic­ture of a mother and father watch­ing their daugh­ter in a bal­let recital, and try to make me think eat­ing pork is .okay. Why don’t you just come right out and say, “we want you to buy our prod­uct?” This would give me the oppor­tu­nity to say, “you tor­ture pigs and hurt the eniron­ment in doing so.“
    This is my rant. It amazes me that these large cor­po­ra­tions just don’t get this. How much money do they spend in order to alien­ate me, I often wonder?

  4. Pingback: The real trouble with Facebook is its escalating self-contradiction. | David Pensato

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *