It’s a wonderful wired world for marketing––or scary as hell!
David Ogilvy and Bill Bernbach could never have imagined that “word-of-mouth” advertising meant this. (photo: blognaver)
If you’re not wired up, you might want to stick to shopping, not selling
Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook (forbes.com)
Those sizeable numbers in my email notice (PCs around for 35 years, the Internet for 20 years, 2 billion people on the Internet, 1 billion smartphones, Facebook with over 1 billion people) came from an insightful interview on Charlie Rose last week that featured three people who know a thing or two about the digital world: Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, Marc Andreessen, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and Facebook board member, and Ken Auletta a technology writer with the New Yorker.
The video is worth watching. If you don’t have time to watch the full interview (50 minutes), fast forward to Charlie’s chat with Sandberg and Andreseen. Very insightful. Here’s the link:
http://www.charlierose.com/view/content/12667
A few highlights (with my comments) if you don’t have time to view the video:
Coming soon to your pocket or purse––5 billion smartphones, connecting everyone to everyone to everything, everywhere. (photo: facebook)
- Smartphones will become central to our life’s communications – the hub – and there will be one in every pocket or purse.
- Marketing will become 90% driven by software. So get yourself up to speed or hire the best. And get your kids into software classes, quick. As Marc Andreessen says, “Software will eat the world.”
- Most of the marketing and advertising money is still on the side of the “traditional media” equation, but it isn’t going to stay that way for long. Online is addressing a first principle of marketing: be customer-centric. Two behemoths come to mind: Amazon
Jeff Bezo saw the whole picture of the wired future before most people even thought about it.
and Facebook. They are creating enormous consumer value and building huge numbers, which will be followed by the money. They are deferring financial “gratification” and playing long ball, which is uncharacteristic of many traditional corporations. They just have to figure out how to monetize it. And they will (don’t be too worried about Facebook’s current stock price). If you’re in marketing, advertising or the business of selling something, you might want to get on board with these online juggernauts before they’re too far from the dock.
Great viral video. Tom Brady and Underarmour at their best.
different in terms of content. The same old, same old gets trashed in a “click.” Here’s an example of great online advertising gone viral (Tom Brady for Underarmour).
Around and around, where it stops nobody knows. (digital planet.co.uk)
It’s just the beginning
As Sheryl Sandberg says, “We are just at the beginning” (of the digital frontier). And the fact that all seven billion humans on the planet are social animals it follows that some smart marketing people will figure out how to connect everyone to everyone, to everything, everywhere, all of the time. Whether it’s scary or up lifting, it is reality. And if you’re in marketing and not yet wired up then you may soon find yourself disconnected, short-circuited, out of touch and out of business.
“People are the worst”
Coming 2026
My personal history is the stuff they write books about. And that's what I am doing. The working title, "Chains of My Father: Marry White."
"The ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds." - Barack Obama
This perspicacious line from the Prologue of Barack Obama's "Dream from My Father" wrenched my aspiration into action. I started writing, furiously. Unlike Obama's perspective, my pain had been for the opposite reason: I was not seen by whites as a "tragic mulatto," rather I lived every day of my childhood hoping whites were not "searching my eyes for some telltale sign" that I WAS mulatto. This is my story.
It's historical fiction because I cannot find enough records to substantiate all facets of the story. I've combed the genealogy, traveled to my father and grandmothers' birthplace, walked the graveyards, searched the churches and ... well, all the facts aren't there. I have written three books based on the genealogy of other families but my ancestors emerged from a journey that left too few records – slavery.
My paternal, great grandmother was a "freed slave." My grandmother, Amelia, was born to a mixed race slave named Mary (we do not know her last name) and a white, French plantation owner, the Count de Poullain, in Grenada, West Indies. Amelia was raised in the "Big House" and in adulthood, in an attempt to escape her black heritage disowned her mother, telling her, "Get out and never come back." Amelia, as a mother of twelve children, enshrined into the family commandments, "Marry white." Many did, including my father. My mother was a lovely, white, Anglo-Saxon protestant born in England. They met in Canada where my dad studied and became a doctor.
It has taken five generations for the descendants of Mary to free themselves from the stigma of their black heritage but today my children embrace it. Unfortunately, the past 250 years have been a wasteland of bigotry, racism and bullying. But, on closer look, we see not only the brutality, fear, violence, and murder but also the self-respect, dignity, love, kindness, perseverance and indomitable spirit.
As of the spring of 2025, the depth of historic perspective and the sweeping inspiration of oppressed people has created a two-volume duology of which I have only arrived at the middle of the 19th century. 1840 is the year my great grandfather was born, the beginning of Volume II, and he's pushing me to make sure our story is published by the summer of 2026.
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