I just finished reading a 1998 interview of Seth Godin with The Fast Company. The whole interview was basically aimed at having Seth Godin explain the marketing concept that he pioneered; permission marketing, and how his company, Yoyodyne was using online games and sweepstakes to aid companies acquire customers via this concept.
Instead the whole interview turned out to be some sort of a sit-down with the three witches of Macbeth as his perspective on what online was supposed to be like is now, 20 years later, THE standard. In other words, he predicted the future of marketing. What strikes me most is that he wasn’t making predictions per se. He was just talking about how he saw internet marketing at the time; what it was like and what it ought to be. Most of the predictions he made have turned out to be true.
In attempting to explain Permission Marketing, which can be defined loosely as persuading customers to give you their attention before you sell them your products, he mentioned that “Interruption Marketing” was still the standard of the time. You could be watching a TV Show and you were interrupted by six 30-seconds advertisements. He said interruption marketing was dying away as more and more people were exposed to adverts (3000 daily) and having TV ads interrupt an episode of Seinfeld, for example, was a nuisance. It was important that marketers shift from this approach and move to one where getting the customer’s attention and his approval to continue having a relationship with them would trump.
