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Number
26: October 29, 2003
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This week in Katydid:
Halloween
Horror Show
In the spirit of the season, some people are trying to scare us to
death. Here's a quote from Inc.
Magazine:
Experts warn that moves against phone-based marketing are just the
beginning… Washington watchers expect all forms of marketing to come
under fire, one by one. ("Telemarketing after 'Do Not
Call'", p34, November 2003)
Then it quotes Chris
Selland, managing director of Reservoir Partners, a Cambridge, Mass.
Consulting firm:
We'll have do not call, do not e-mail, do not put anything in my
mailbox. Washington is absolutely going to jump all over this. (Ibid.)
Additionally, The U.S. Senate just passed
a bill (97 to 0) outlawing spam techniques. The House of
Representatives should have their version by next year. Again,
doomsayers predict the end of marketing.
Just
this week the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
in support of Microsoft asked the U.S. Patent Office to invalidate a
patent owned by Eolas
Technologies. The patent if enforced could be applied to the
hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and might prevent anyone from using
the web to transfer any files (or pay Eolas for the privilege).
It's easy to see gloom and doom approaching (I plead no contest), but
it's not quite fair. First, one should never cry danger without
providing some direction. Second, the landscape may change, which will
require new strategies, but marketing is not going to die. It's going to
get better.
I don't think the 'do not contact' lists will work. To me, they
appear to be prior restraint on free speech. Like a 'no solicitors'
sign, the list will be enticing to hackers as strong prospects and there
are too many technical hurdles to leap to enforce such a system.
If passed, laws will be difficult to enforce. Legitimate marketers
will carry the burden while spammers move offshore. A technical solution
may take so long to implement that the point will be moot as recipients
stop using e-mail in its current form.
The bright side is that marketers are being proactive and lobbying
hard for a national (perhaps an international) standard. In fact, the
current Senate bill would void the many state-level spam laws in place.
Faced with the prospect of hiring expert lawyers in interstate and
international law, marketers will gladly take some restrictions.
As for the W3C's protection of open standards, the entire world
benefits too much from the Internet to allow a company retroactively to
deactivate it. Perhaps I'm jaded, but if every patent granted in this
country that was infringed upon or stolen outright were redressed, the
whole of technological civilization would collapse.
So, I was saying that people cry doom too often. I have faith that
lawyers and politicians will work out the back end details. Though the
problem is not marketing, the problem is that people hate interruptions
and if you've been reading Seth
Godin at all in the last decade, you'd know that interruption
marketing doesn't work anyway.
There is the problem of bootstrapping. No doubt, it will be harder to
gain momentum for smaller and younger companies. If all marketing
becomes permission-based, how can one gain permission without marketing
somehow? (Ideas? Send them our way and we'll share them with the class.)
However, people love marketing. That's worth saying twice. People
love marketing. More accurately, people love good marketing
because it tells a story. It uses humor or drama to catch us by
surprise. It connects with us at a deep level because it understands our
problems and provides a solution.
In America, we arrive at movies 20 minutes early to watch quality
marketing. We download movie trailers off the Internet. We watch MTV
(Marketing Television) endlessly. We eagerly anticipate catalogs from
companies we love. We don't identify with brands; we identify with brand
stories. We buy Harley-Davidson jackets even if we'll never own a hog.
In Europe, they dedicate entire television channels to marketing and
people watch because it is entertaining. (Here we only have the Victoria's
Secret webcast, but at least we're trying.)
The proposed legislation seeks to eliminate the worst and cheapest
forms of marketing and though it will fail that goal, it will put the
emphasis back on quality. Shoddy marketers won't be able to compete.
We all love to spin ghost stories and it's fun to predict the
end of the world as we know it from time to time, but that's only
because we're creative, clever storytellers, and it's tough to pass up a
good story. Which, as it turns out, is your happy ending.
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Kind regards,
Kevin Troy Darling
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