Marketers Must Digitally 'Listen' or Die

According to "The Chaos Scenario," widgets, YouTube, and crowd sourcing has changed everything faster than you think.

"On the Media" radio host, troublemaker and professionally cranky AdAge commentator Bob Garfield is a media guru. Really. His latest project is a series of provocative essays that you should read for its trenchant analysis of exactly why it will be tougher and tougher to make money with media and information businesses, as well as excellently reported specific interviews and examples of where this business might go in the future.

In "The Chaos Scenario: Amid the Ruins of Mass Media, The Choice for Business is Stark: Listen or Perish "-- as well as the Web site, and downloadable chapters and a "30 Days of Chaos" international chat-a-thon run by a wide range of membership organizations -- Garfield wants the media and marketers of all kinds to know that "the many ways in which the simple exercise of listening enhances and even replaces business disciplines that have undergirded commerce since time immemorial."

Among Garfield's many compelling topics are:

-- Where widgets came from, what widgets really are, why they are a fabulous tale of the power of digital media, and by the way what they can and cannot do for your business.

-- The tyranny of crowds -- especially anonymous ones -- as a very real public harm that comes from the public good of the Internet. He calls this "a meditation on the implications of the Total Surveillance Society."

-- Capturing and summarizing word-of-mouth that is out there in the social networks - how tough it is and how necessary Garfield thinks it is to run any successful business or institution.

-- Crowd-sourced advertising and design -- and how that's working out for the clients and the creatives.

You know Garfield is smart -- and skeptical. And he doesn't shy away from exploring complex problems and the even more complex potential solutions throughout the book.

I appreciate how Garfield summarized the whole YouTube/Google ROI thing. Despite the fact that "it is, after all, Google we're talking about," Garfield sees Google's YouTube fortunes hinging on mostly stuff with no game:

1. Viral ads that produce no revenue
2. Annoying overlays that a prominent ad network insists are "proven not to work"
3. Pre-roll ads that send 22 percent of the audience running in the opposite direction and irritate the rest
4. Huge billboards advertising movies to people watching videos on computers
5. The Russian-roulette risks of appending ads to sketch user-generated content, rendering (as of 2009) 91 percent of inventory unsellable
6. Tracking/targeting technology that has already triggered the ire of the house Committee on Energy and Technology and is therefore undeployable

"And then there is a seventh little issue... The troublesome tendency of Joe Laptop to upload video content wholly or partially stolen from its rightful owners."