Marketing used to be easy. Back when we had three channels and no zip-zapper, a good marketing plan was based on interrupting your “scheduled broadcast” to bring your this “important message” from our sponsor.

Companies would spent loads of cash so that some box of cereal would go dancing and singing across the screen, and the vulgar masses would go running down to the Piggly Wiggly to purchase said box of cereal.

The communication was one-directional.

You could push advertising content by brute force, without permission from the audience, because that was all that anyone ever knew.

Limited content, limited choices, limited information; this created an atmosphere fit for the Don Drapers of the world (cue cat-call), who could dazzle an audience into a consumerist frenzy with a clever phrase or an entertaining skit. But now the game has changed and anyone who is in the business of sharing ideas needs to realize it.

Or.

They will be left behind.

Unlimited content, unlimited choices, unlimited information; this is the current situation, and it is not too friendly to the Don Draper type. After all, you can’t give scotch to a search engine.

Unsurprisingly, the interwebs have changed everything (Yes, interwebs). We now choose the content we see thanks to sites like Youtube, Hulu, Netflix, Vimeo, etc. Sometimes we can even choose the advertisements we watch. This is a new challenge for people who want to share meaningful stories—aka, marketers, preachers, politicians, humans of all shapes and sizes.

How do we get our ideas, our stories, to the people now that we have to ask permission to do so?

Good question.

Seth Godin—marketing guru extraordinaire—says it better than I can. Here’s a post of his on permission marketing.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/permission-mark.html