I’m a geek. I love gadgets, tech toys, and whizbangs of all kinds. I also love great, innovative marketing.

So why is it that so many marketers missed the “Can vs Should” distinction, and insist on treating every new technology as a battering ram into my awareness, rather than an opportunity for more frictionless message delivery?

The most recent example of this was a billboard in New York City featuring hypersonic speakers – so passers-by seemed to hear the billboard’s audio message in their heads. I’m not kidding. Talk about violating privacy… it’s bad enough we all walk down the street talking to ourselves and gesturing (Bluetooth headsets and cell phones), seems like now we’ll also all need the matching tinfoil hats.

But this is only the most recent, egregious example I’ve encountered of great technology being subverted.

The classic example, of course, is email – where instead of taking advantage of the ability to do more¬ targeted communication and cut down on “noise”, marketers did the inverse, creating so much clutter than email is now an almost useless medium for targeted message transmission.

But there are more examples.  My local supermarket has advertisements in the floor tiling, as well as on the carts, the shelves, hanging from the ceiling, and written on the obverse of the register receipt. 

It’s like some mad parody, reminiscent of the Fuller Brush Man door-to-door cartoon stereotype: force your way in, demand someone’s attention, and be so annoying that they’ll buy something just to get away.

This is stupid marketing, and the backlash is strong.

I don’t have a solution, either – just common sense, aka “respect for others”. Take a lesson from the successful door-to-door merchandisers of the modern era – the chia pet merchandiser, or ronco-matic. Make your audience laugh, not wince. Entertain and educate, don’t bully and harass.

In short, treat others as you’d hope to be treated. Enjoy the technology… but don’t fall prey to the “what it can do” vs “what you should do” syndrome.

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