Seth Godin On The Spot

Author and entrepreneur Seth Godin may still be best known for having predicted, in 1994, that the Internet was a fad that wouldn't last. Yet, in 1995, he founded interactive marketing firm Yoyodyne, which Yahoo! bought three years later in an all-stock deal worth about $30 million. The 45-year-old Buffalo, N.Y., native was vp of direct marketing for Yahoo! until 2000. He preaches his vision of the new age of marketing in a number of best-selling books—among them, Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, Free Prize Inside! and, most recently, All Marketers Are Liars—and on sethgodin.com. Q: Where's the line between white lies that marketers tell and the more insidious ones?A: What marketers really are are storytellers. It's the consumers who are liars. Marketers who succeed tell stories that people want to believe, and the lies are what the consumers tell themselves they want to believe. A white lie is a story that isn't literally true, meaning that Dasani or Aquafina aren't worth the money, but if we package it right and sell it right and advertise it right, someone is glad that we did it. I distinguish that from a fraud. An example is 20 years of telling Americans SUVs were safe and practical. Authenticity is at the core of this. You have to have a story that can hold up to scrutiny on the Internet, that can hold up to people talking about you. The vast majority of marketing is fibs, then? Yes, because you can't succeed in the long run by defrauding people. The emergence of blogging must make it easier to expose frauds. That's exactly right. If digital cameras were out 25 years ago, you'd have a column in The New York Times every three months reviewing them, but that would be it. Now there are pages and pages devoted to ranking and analyzing them. You win by having actual use and interaction with the camera, by being something that people are delighted to talk about. Which marketers are doing it right? The more you interact with Amazon, the more you like them. Howard Schultz is obsessed with coffee, and it shows. At Dunkin' Donuts, they could add couches to their stores, but they still wouldn't be Starbucks. Who's doing terribly? Most airline marketing is a fraud, because they tell you one thing but you hate it when you get there. Are corporate blogs frauds? Well, let me distinguish. There are real corporate blogs. Joel Spolsky, the president of Fog Creek Software—his blog is one of the top 50 most-read blogs in the world. He's speaking on his behalf and on behalf of the company, and it's incredibly effective. That's different from hiring a PR firm to put your talking points out, pretending they're your customers. Sooner or later, you discover that the person who is pretending to be a big fan is actually a scumbag, and that's all you're going to remember about the company for the rest of your life. What should companies know if they want to get into blogging? You cannot ask the question, "How do I use this new tool to continue my old manipulation strategy?" What you have to do instead is realize that the loss of the ability to interrupt people profitably, the amazing amount of clutter and the two-way interactions like blogs mean you have to be transparent. You have to invent your story and then live your story, and once you live your story, it's easy to tell your story. If you try to have a thing and then build a story about it that manipulates the recipient, you're going to fail.Where on that curve of understanding is the ad industry? There's one group, which says I need to do what my client pays me to do, or I won't have any business. I would say that's 80 percent. The other 20 percent have realized that they have a skill set that would allow them to go back upstream. They say, "Look, you can give us $30 million to advertise this, but for $300,000 you ought to also invite us to your product-development meetings." Someone is going to end up with that job, and it might as well be the ad agencies, because they're uniquely qualified to do it.Which other writers do you admire?David Sedaris and Dave Barry. From a business point of view, Tom Peters, Jay Levinson and Zig Ziglar have all been huge influences on my work. Now that we're in the blog world, there are writers who only write 10 paragraphs, and I treasure their words.Can you name one person you've never worked with but would like to? Oprah. Here's a person with no built-in advantages who figured out how to touch a huge number of people in a really deep way, so that they believe her when she tells them something. With a few exceptions, like giving away that car, she has done it without pandering and without manipulating people. If they made a movie about the marketing industry, who would play you?Jim Carrey. I think my face is a little plastic, and I'm not afraid to share a lot of energy. What's your biggest fear in life?That fundamentalism is ripping the world apart.Give me three words to describe yourself. Bold but surprisingly calm.How about three words that other people might use?Arrogant, ill-researched and in too much of a hurry. How about three words to describe the advertising industry?Shiny, clever and dying.

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Seth Godin On The Spot

Tim Nudd

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Tim Nudd