Our family was recently watching the new Curious George movie and at one point I asked my ten-year old son if he noticed anything interesting about a truck the man in the yellow hat was driving. “It’s a Volkswagen” he said immediately. (He’s got a marketing gene.)
In the 70’s, typical urban dwellers saw about 500-2000 messages a day. By 2006, they are seeing between 3000 and 5000. And there’s no mute button for most of them; it’s just clutter. Noise. Marketing noise.
Venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki recently changed the title of his blog to Signal without Noise, as in the opposite of spam. We tend to think of spam as worthless – a spam filter blocks junk. But spam usually has some value for someone, just an absolute lack of targeting. The more the good marketers are able to target their audiences, the more obvious spam becomes and easier to delete, block or ignore. With new ways to identify it like digital markers, getting the value of untargeted noise-without-signal to approach zero and disappear is coming closer to reality.
