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Interruptive Advertising
In the beginning there was the television commercial. And it was good. We’ll it wasn’t that it was good or bad, it was that we understood, as we have understood with radio commercials, and print advertising before, that these interruptions – ergo “interruptive advertising” – were bringing us information, as in the case of a newspaper and entertainment. It was a tradeoff. Then came e-mail and spam and we took back control.
While we tend not to think of e-mail in the same vein as The New York Times, NPR, or Lost, those with an inclination to sell us something did, and so permission advertising evolved and advertising without permission, aka spam, reared its ugly head as well. It is spam, and the behavior of the insidious purveyors of everything from Viagra to enlargements to dirty pictures that have brought us social media.
Social media is a reaction to interruptive advertising. While we the audience had an understood truce from time immemorium, spam pushed us over the top. Social media channels gave us, the audience/consumer back our power, one of the basic tenets of social media, if you, as the marketer, push it too hard, we turn you off. Blogs, websites, Facebook pages, tweets etc. that step over the line are deal killers. We as audience/consumers determine what is acceptable. It’s the new paradigm, and this power we are not going to give up.
