Permission Marketing

The Cost of Being Ignored

Three thousand. That's how many marketing messages the average person waves away between waking up and going to bed. About a million a year. By the time you finish this sentence, half a dozen more have tried to grab your sleeve, and you've batted them away without a thought. That is the world Seth Godin was staring at in 1999 when he sat down to write "Permission Marketing," and the situation has only sharpened since.

His case is blunt. The whole apparatus of modern advertising — the Super Bowl spot, the highway billboard, the radio jingle, the catalog you tossed straight into the recycling bin — rests on a single rude assumption: that strangers owe you their attention. They don't. They never did. The price of pretending otherwise has climbed so high that the system is buckling under its own weight, and the book is Godin's proposal for what to build in its place.

What he is proposing is not a tactic, not a clever spin on copywriting, not a new media channel. It is a re-architecting of the entire relationship between a company and the human being it wants as a customer. You stop ambushing strangers and start dating them. You earn the right to keep talking. You measure your asset not in eyeballs but in standing invitations. By the time he is done, the cozy assumptions of the old advertising business look more like a dying industry than a healthy one, and a quieter, slower, far more profitable model has taken its place.

The Catch-22 That Broke Mass Advertising

Godin opens with a marketing crisis that money cannot solve, and walks through it like a coroner. Seventeen thousand new grocery products are introduced every year. About a thousand dollars worth of ads are aimed at every consumer in America. A single trip down the cereal aisle exposes you to ten thousand pitches. An hour of network television hits you with forty more. A daily newspaper, a hundred. You are not, strictly speaking, a person any more. You are a target.