Been a while since I posted a marketing cartoon from the great Tom Fishburne, so when this caught my eye I had no hesitation…

The original post is at…

“interruption marketing”

…and well worth reading.

Tom Fishburne draws attention to these comments from the great Seth Godin…

“Marketing is a contest for people’s attention. Thirty years ago, people gave you their attention if you simply asked for it. You’d interrupt their TV program, and they’d listen to what you had to say. You’d put a billboard on the highway, and they’d look at it. That’s not true anymore. This year, the average consumer will see or hear 1 million marketing messages – that’s almost 3,000 per day. No human being can pay attention to 3,000 messages every day.

“The interruption model is extremely effective when there’s not an overflow of interruptions. If you tap someone on the shoulder at church, you’re going to get that person’s attention. But there’s too much going on in our lives for us to enjoy being interrupted anymore. So our natural response is to ignore the interruptions….

“Interruption marketing is giving way to a new model that I call permission marketing. The challenge for companies is to persuade consumers to raise their hands – to volunteer their attention. You tell consumers a little something about your company and its products, they tell you a little something about themselves, you tell them a little more, they tell you a little more – and over time, you create a mutually beneficial learning relationship. Permission marketing is marketing without interruptions.”

Seth Godin is credited with coming up with the term “Interruption Marketing” to describe what we might call the conventional “one step” approach to advertising and marketing and wrote the book “Permission Marketing” as something of an antidote to that mainstream approach.

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