Jonathan Peterson writes to a mailing list:

AdAge is carrying a transcript of Steve Heyer’s (Coke’s President and COO) keynote speech at Advertising Age’s Madison & Vine conference. AdAge talks the speech up as a revolutionary manifesto and it is a good read, clearly designed to rev up the conference goers. But as I got into the speech I realized that the conversational language of the cluetrain was being co opted, and what Steve seems to really be saying is “All these CONSUMERS are becoming deaf to our messages, we need to get Hollywood, Madison Ave and corporate America all on the same page to make sure we can continue to control these people. (In the speech he actually uses the term CUSTOMERS to refer to ad agencies and holly wood, while we are of course CONSUMERS).

I blogged some of the better bits from the speech: I’m pretty hesitant to be telling a company like Coke about marketing (that’s pretty much a career decision when you live in Atlanta), but it’s amazing that Steve is completely overlooking the value of spending some of the conversational effort he’s talking about making with “partners” into talking with some of us “consumers”. Perhaps the reason the marketplace is fragmenting is that we don’t want to be boxed up and labeled? Instead of convincing ad agencies and media companies to get in bed with Coke to sell *to* us and drive our desires, wouldn’t it be interesting to find ways to engage your customers directly by finding out what we want and finding ways to enable those desires instead??

I’m late blogging this. Here’s Doc, Brian McGroarty and Doc again.

Categories: Uncategorized dw