Jarrett House North

New York Times: Consumers, Long the Targets, Become the Shapers of Campaigns. Sigh. You know, I thought Doc Searls and Dave Weinberger worked this out years ago, folks. Consumer = someone who consumes, or as the Cluetrain quotes, “a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash.” If you really want to talk about people participating in your business, then you’re not talking about just a consumer any more, but a customer. Big difference. Do you take consumers seriously? How about customers?

To the point of this article: How would you advertise to a consumer? Buy, buy, buy. How about to a customer? Maybe you don’t advertise at all, maybe you just put out the information about your product and let them decide. Both are forms of marketing—maybe even valid forms of advertising—but only one is enlightened.

To be clear, I’m mostly complaining about Crest’s interactive advertising campaign, which has very little to do with enlightened customer-centric marketing. I see Crest asking me to vote on toothpaste and I think, You don’t respect me and you don’t respect my time. Calling Crest’s campaign, which sends “e-mail message[s] from Crest urging [customers] to vote every day” for their favorite toothpaste flavor, “marketing” is like calling that condescending lecture from your least-favorite aunt who forgets you’re more than five years old a “conversation.” (It also sounds like a good way to drive up Crest’s opt-out and unsubscribe numbers.)

But Staples’ interactive product design contest—encouraging customers to submit new product ideas—is respectful. Their process is much more like a true conversation. Maybe the difference is as much in the nature of the products as it is in the companies. After all, who needs another flavor of toothpaste?

Last point: I’m not sure how the Times can write an article about companies using interactive marketing and not ask the other partner in the equation, the customers, to comment. The only voices in this article are advertising companies and product marketers. You would think they would have asked at least one toothpaste user how he liked being asked to vote. Then maybe they would have found out something.

At the least, can we get the Times to stop writing articles that use the word consumer when they mean you and me?

A few emails in reaction to my Grokster piece, both pointing me to more detailed responses elsewhere. David Goldenberg writes, “Thought you might enjoy this most recent interview with Mark Cuban over at Gelf Magazine…”:

At first glance, it would seem that the Supreme Court has dealt Mark Cuban, who helped fund Grokster’s legal team, a pretty severe blow. But Cuban says the Supreme Court focused on how the technology was marketed, and not the technology itself, and thinks that the ruling will stem any moves by Congress toward passing laws that could potentially be even more restrictive of technology….

Gelf Magazine: Is this a major victory for the entertainment and recording industries?

Mark Cuban: No. It’s a major victory for lawyers everywhere.

And according to Business Week’s interview with Larry Lessig, the famed intellectual property specialist is in agreement:

Q: Why do you think the Supreme Court decided to take on this case rather than letting the issues get decided in Congress?

A: Increasingly, this court is oblivious to the costs of its own decisions. The Reagan Administration pushed the regulatory-impact statements. I think we need an equivalent Ronald Reagan to push the judicial-opinion-impact statement that tries to calculate the efficiency costs of certain legal rules. I continue to be disappointed in Justice Souter’s obtuseness to the costs of the complexity that he adds to the copyright system….

Q: So the problem with the decision is just that the Supreme Court rendered an opinion at all, rather than letting legislators decide?

A: Right. By making it a process that goes through the courts, you’ve just increased the legal uncertainty around innovation substantially and created great opportunities to defeat legitimate competition. You’ve shifted an enormous amount of power to those who oppose new types of competitive technologies. Even if in the end, you as the innovator are right, you still spent your money on lawyers instead of on marketing or a new technology.

In Congress, we might have a lot of argument about what the statute should look like. But that would be a process that would resolve this intensely political issue politically. Instead, Justice Souter engages in common-law lawmaking, which is basically judges making up the law they want to apply to this particular case. And not just Supreme Court judges—what they’ve done is invite a wide range of common-law lawmaking by judges around the country trying to work out the details of what this intent standard really is.

Thanks to Rob Hof, Business Week’s Silicon Valley bureau chief, for the tip about the interview (also see the comments thread on his BW blog post). I kept waiting for Lessig’s comment to appear on his blog, and I’m still waiting; this confirms my suspicions that the so called “inducement test” from the ruling is anything but a bright line.

New York Times: Web Content by and for the Masses. The tone of John Markoff’s article is fairly laudatory toward the efforts by various large corporations toward what I am starting to think of as Our Internet—the part of the Web featuring content that touches our lives or that we generate ourselves. Markoff’s examples include Flickr, the applications that have been layered on top of Google Maps, Yahoo’s My Web, Apple and Microsoft’s embrace of RSS in their browsers, Will Wright’s Spore, Technorati, and the infamous LA Times wikitorial experiment.

So what about the most recent corporate foray into Our Internet: Apple’s new podcasting support? The subscription model is clean, the price is right, you can grab individual episodes or subscribe to a podcast indefinitely, clean model to take the content with you, and clear instructions on how to publish your own feeds (even if the namespace is funky). What’s not to like?

Well, take a look at the Podcasting Directory (iTunes required, or see screenshot). Who creates the content in this directory? How deep do you have to go before you find true user-created content? On first glance, it looks to me like podcasting is about Disney, ABC, ESPN, public and commercial radio, and Adam Curry. if you scroll down there’s “Indie Podcasts,” but that’s a tiny percentage of the directory’s public face that looks like Our Internet. Everything else is business as usual.

The irony is that if you dig into the directory through one of the category links on the lower left, the balance is redressed: there are 816 audioblogs (as of this writing) listed, compared to probably three hundred other listings. But from a promotional standpoint, it’s all about big content (and maybe about ad or sponsorship revenue for Apple; surely the presence of ABC, Disney, and ESPN all above the fold suggests some kind of promotional package with ABC Corporate).

And because podcasts are just audio, there are none of the attention-sharing features (like searchability, tags, or even hyperlinks) that might help provide automated ways of discovering and surfacing new voices. Unless I’m missing something? But it seems like we have a level content publishing model but a very un-level content promotional and discovery market.