Monday night saw the excellent Seth Godin address the Geek Dinner at London’s Texas Embassy. His theme was that the era of interruptive advertising was coming to an end. He argued that people were less and less susceptible to buying products as a consequence of being forced to stop what they were doing and wait to absorb an advertising message. He cited the increasing use of pop-up blockers online, and TiVO on TV. (One might also add those who use RSS readers to that list) He demonstrated declining response rates from such advertising.

Instead Godin argued that all marketers were, as he put it, “in the fashion business”, and that the job of companies was to design and sell things that were, of their nature, remarkable, and which created word-of-mouth commentary. The example he uses here is his famous Purple Cow. A Purple Cow is a creature so extraordinary that its very existence is a matter of comment. As consumers comment on it, they spread news of its existence. The real world analogy is the comparison between BMW and GM’s Lincoln Mercury. GM spends 15 times as much marketing the Lincoln Mercury as BMW spends marketing the equivalent model. BMW don’t need to promote their car. The customers do that for them.

He said (if I understood him aright) that the future of marketing success lay in growth driven by a) remarkable products, b) permission-based advertising media.

This argument does not suggest that conventional advertising and marketing has to disappear. Far from it. It suggests that in order to succeed advertising and marketing messages have to change. They adopt more of the characteristics which were previously the preserve of publishers and broadcasters. Marketing and advertising messages have to take on the characteristics of content. They have to become stories - stories that are interesting enough to pass on. Otherwise they will simply be blocked by our increasingly efficient spam filters.

Seth Godin’s argument relates directly to the use of blogging and RSS. RSS is of its nature a permission-based source of information. I will only subscribe to a feed which is delivering me high-quality information. I will only pay attention to information which is timely and relevant to me. In the blogosphere I will give more attention to blogs which are endorsed or linked by people whose values I trust. In both cases the “story” needs to be strong enough to get me to opt-in to the communication. My finger is permanently hovering over the click which will take me somewhere else, possibly forever.

Mark Rogers CEO of Market Sentinel has published a survey of RSS business models on New Media Knowledge.