Over a year ago Stowe Boyd remarks here
about a possible future of social networking, marketing, advertising
and e-commerce in general. While I would LOVE if this came to pass, I’m
sure that the market doesn’t move as fast as I want it to, nor do I
believe that it will necessarily move in the direction I would like.

You see, we are in an era of redefining the way we want to be
consumer-ized, if that’s even a term. We have one of the first examples
in the 30-second skip function of Tivo, and all of the uproar by the
broadcast networks about their television ad-revenues being eaten away
by it. Another is the so-called ‘ad-blocking’ plugins for various
popular web browsers. Google’s AdSense and various other ad-services
have been battling click-through versus actual conversion rates for a
long time and have been trying to be more effective in those targets
and conversions. Many of us consumers, however, naturally rely on our
own communities of information in order to obtain recommendations for
consumer purchases.

Crap, okay, so the first two examples I was going to use about cars and
pizzas in television commercials didn’t hold water as I know most of us
actually MIGHT say I want that pizza or that was just on TV because it
looks appealing. However, for many purchases, such as music players,
home appliances, clothing, furniture, etc… we generally rely on our
communities to recommend products and services that they, themselves
have enjoyed. Honestly, while television commercials might still
influence me and my friends, word-of-mouth recommendations hold much
more water than advertisements that are either obnoxious or are
downright insulting.

I guess I need to make a point. I would LOVE to participate in
marketing objectives where companies actually cared about the
intelligence and opinion of their target audience and treated us in a
way that displayed respect instead of arrogance. The methods Stowe
mentions in this post would be most appealing to me because they do
just that. They are an example of letting products speak for themselves
instead of spinning the truth around a product to get it out the door
and into a “sucker’s” hands. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I
have never liked being treated like a sucker…