In the new ad landscape, marketers must get permission, keep promises—and lose control

Brandweek, Oct 2, 2000 by Seth Godin

Talk to people in advertising and they are likely to have similar reasons for getting into the business in the first place. They like playing with the images. It's a chance to do cool creative--to relive the ads we loved as kids or to be Darren Stevens. Even if you're an account exec, it's fun stuff to be around.

The ad business has always been about shaping opinion and making images. And a lot of that is driven by the dynamic of traditional mass marketing. Interrupt people with an unexpected, often unwelcome ad, and suddenly (or gradually) turn these momentarily annoyed people into the fascinated, the transfixed and the sold.

That's quite a challenge, and really fun when you're good at it. The Apple 1984 campaign, the Absolut Vodka ads, the old VW classics-- they were interruption advertising at its best.

Today, alas, the future looks very different. The advertising practitioners who are honest with themselves understand that the titanic amount of clutter facing the average consumer makes it almost impossible to succeed with the old techniques--no matter how good the ads are. No, if you're going to have a chance to get people to pay attention (when attention is the most precious commodity on the planet), you're going to have to get their permission in advance.

Marketers with permission discover that they get a 35 percent to 50 percent response rate from their direct-mail campaigns online. Marketers with permission discover that day-after recall is close to 100 percent on their best work. Marketers with permission discover that the Web sites they build are far, far more profitable than the financial sinkholes built by the venture capital-backed disasters we've all read about.

Getting permission and using it is pretty simple. You ask for permission in a socially acceptable way. You say, "If I give you x, will you pay attention to my future messages to you?" If x is something I want--maybe information, or discounts, or access, or prizes--then I'm likely to say yes.

And using permission is pretty simple. Keep your promises. If you promise to talk to me once a week about breakthroughs in patent law, do just that. Don't rent my name, sell my name or try to sell me a new car.

Now, this is pretty commonsensical. So why do so many advertisers hate it? Because you're not in charge any more. You don't get to decide when and how to interrupt the masses. You've got to earn the right.

And worst of all, you don't get to film the next Clio-winning commercial. I know, it's lousy, but it's true. Advertising, thanks to the Web and clutter and noise and brand proliferation, has suddenly, terribly, turned into direct marketing.

So test, measure, evolve and test some more. Welcome to the next century. Welcome to permission marketing!

Seth Godin is the author of Permission Marketing. To get the first four chapters of the New York Times business best-seller for free, write to free@permission.com.