We used to call them “Consumers” and we fully believed their minds were ours to toy with. Then something happended. The sheep looked up. And now we have to admit that we are all just members of the same audience.
They watch what they want to engage with. And we watch as they disengage from what we have been feeding
them to watch for years. Decades. In fact, almost a Century. The Audience has moved on from advertising.
That would be Madison Avenue getting smaller and smaller in the the rear view mirror of its Audience.
In 2006, right after P&G’s Shafley branded the current marketing business model as “broken”, Harry
Webber engaged a bunch of really smart people in a company called Smart, and started looking for a
way to fix what was “broken.” First we had to find out where it was broken. Turns out the answer was
somewhere between “Everywhere” and “Wherever.” So we ordered pizza and decided to start from
scratch. The only thing we agreed upon up front was we would never call it “Advertising 2.0″ And we
committed to being as transparant about what we were doing, as prudent, so that others might understand
our findings and contribute to their development, refinement, deployment, evaluating and improving…
constantly. Kaizen!
