Seth’s blog post today has made me realize that marketers are to be blamed for killing money. It’s something that should have been obvious for me but for some reason it wasn’t until today.
What Seth calls the “TV-Industrial Complex” is a positive feedback loop driven by money. It works like this:
- Buy ads (with money, input).
- Get more distribution (with money).
- Sell more products (make money).
- Make a profit (output).
- Buy more ads.
Critically, money is used in this positive feedback loop in to context of scarcity: pay enough money to remove the impediments that were making it impossible to publish ads. Those impediments have disappeared together with the publishing impediments.
Anybody can now publish ads and guess what, everybody is publishing ads for free in the form of spam in your mailbox and spam on twitter, spam on websites and spam everywhere.
The new positive feedback loop is the social feedback loop:
- Find people who desperately care about what you do.
- Maybe they’ll tell their friends.
- You get a chance to be excellent.
- Maybe more people will tell their friends.
Critically, in this positive feedback loop money doesn’t play a role anymore. It doesn’t matter how much money you have in the bank, it won’t make you any better at this. The best agencies in town are completely booked and don’t have time for you. Anybody can now compete with you.
By spamming everybody for free marketers have not just broken the old positive feedback loop, they have actually broken money. Money isn’t as liquid anymore as it used to be. You can’t buy attention anymore with money as used to be possible. It’s not that money isn’t accepted anymore, it’s that it can’t buy attention anymore.
In fact, the cost of buying attention hasn’t dropped through the floor, it has stopped existing. Attention – a once costly but affordable resource – isn’t for sale anymore. But that’s only half the story. Open-source software is not for sale either, it’s free. Free access to media doesn’t mean attention is free, it means that the access to media is free.
Attention isn’t free, it’s as scarce as ever. While attention can’t be bought anymore with money it’s still scarce. They only possible conclusion is that money broke down. A resource – attention – which could be acquired with money and some talent can no longer be acquired with money. It’s still as scarce as it used to be and it remains available, actually it’s abundant.
One could say that is because of the end of the Gutenberg revolution and that’s a valid point. Yet it does mean that money broke down with the Gutenberg revolution. I acknowledge that it’s a difficult topic to get your head around – also for me – but I’m struck by the simple observation that money is no longer able to buy a resource which itself hasn’t changed in availability or abundance.
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