We were in a client meeting last week where, as part of an introduction, Craig gave a history of the development of organic search engine optimization. One of the things that he said was that white hat tactics are starting to overtake black hat tactics in effectiveness. Maybe it is true, as the search engines tell us, that ultimately, if we do the right thing for the user, that will also be the right thing for the engines.

It seems to me that the same evolution is happening everywhere in marketing on the internet. For example, pay per click ads have overtaken banner ads, a clear shift from lower to higher value add for the user. And things are going the same direction offline too; consumers are avoiding advertising everywhere that it doesn’t add value for them. Tivo enables it on the TV while satellite radio, iPods and even public radio are bleeding listeners from commercial radio. 
Source: Radio Research Consortium Audience 2010, Report No. 4

Online, not only do people avoid seeing banners, they are moving away from traditional portals to search (again, more user control) and to to scary, uncontrolled places like YouTube and MySpace. Now that the web is becoming read-write, it seems like things are getting extraordinarily complicated for advertisers.

Really, though, they’re getting simpler. There’s an alternative to figuring out how to manipulate people. And it’s easy, if you can let go of the desire to control. Simply produce a great product that people need or want and enable them to talk with you and each other about it.

How? Rebecca Lieb writes:

"’No longer can we view our job as filling gaps between other peoples' content,' said [American Express' VP of Global Advertising Diego Scotti]. 'Soon, there won't be gaps to fill because everything is content.’... When everything is content and everyone's creating content, just how are advertisers going to insinuate themselves in the gaps that are left? “

Wrong question! the right question is how to produce your own content, or at least catalyze it. Figure out who might like your product and tell them about it. How do you tell them? Give your product away. Put your own videos up on YouTube and hope that random people (like me) and mavens post them on their blogs.

Create interesting off-shoots like hip events, cool t-shirts, and free-for-the-taking cartoons. I know, easier said than done. But even the big guys are trying.

BMW has gone all the way and made involvement in the product elemental to the buying experience and the brand, as discussed in yesterday’s New York Times.

At Mini USA, part of BMW of North America, the fact that so many customers choose to customize their cars showed executives that “we’d never have complete control over the brand,” said James L. McDowell, managing director at Mini USA. About 60 percent of the estimated 40,000 Minis the company sells each year are customized. For instance, Mr. McDowell said, some Mini owners dress their cars in naughty costumes for Halloween, and two investment bankers mounted mock shark fins atop the roofs of their Minis.
“It’s a great thing every day to wake up and see what consumers have done to the brand,” Mr. McDowell said, even though “it’s not a culture we necessarily would have come up with on our own.”

While MaterCard inadvertently created a framework for people to make their own videos with the Priceless campaign.

When “you’re tapping into that consumer desire to have a piece of it,” [Lawrence Flanagan, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at MasterCard Worldwide] added, referring to a brand or product, “you have to take the good with the bad.” MasterCard, for instance, has tolerated and, arguably, benefited from the spate of profane or off-color parodies of the “Priceless” campaign.

So, none of really know yet how to do this reliably and predictably, and we may never. But handing over the keys to the customer is the way to get started.

Hat tip to Matt for Rebecca’s article.