The "Fresh" Marketer?

Someone said to me the other day, "Dan, why is your blog called 'The Fresh Marketer'? I mean, you say that you're new to the marketing scene, but in reality, you've grown up with people marketing to you for your entire life."

So -- is she being accurate in this statement? Yes.
Will I change the name of this blog? Nope.

She does make a good point however. I have grown up constantly bombarded with marketing messaging -- so has everyone else. You know what? I think we're tired of it. I think we know when we're being marketed to (at least, when it's done through conventional methods) and we close ourselves off to the message.

If our audience keeps shutting off our marketing messaging before it has a chance to tell them our story, how do we successfully continue to promote ourselves?

• Build a relationship with your audience so that they want to hear what you have to say. Give them information that actually means something to them -- actually has value to them instead of simply promoting your product/service. If that information is truly worth their while, then not only will they devote time to reading it, but they'll probably send it to someone else. Virally spreading your message.
• Delivering them a marketing message in such a way that they don't realize what they're looking at is actually an ad. Some great examples are what Facebook is doing with their NCAA Tourney (see my previous post), Capital One's Mascot Challenge, and (even better) NBC's Grease -- You're the One That I Want. If you think about it all of these promotion tools are delivering a strong marketing message to their audiences while engaging the audience with a fun activity so that they don't shut off to the messaging.

It occurs to me as I'm writing this that these two areas might be able to be combined into a single category of marketing. They seem different, but if you think about it, aren't they really the same thing? When you create an fun activity that captures the attention of your audience, aren't you also making the time they spend with you worth it for them? Doesn't the audience of "Grease -- YTOTIW" have a relationship with the show? Won't 80% of the people who watch every Sunday (who live close enough to NYC) go see the show? I bet they will.