One of the trends that has played such havoc in the creative industries in the past decade has been the way in which the internet had reduced the cost of content distribution to such an extent that anyone can become a publisher. Whether the impact that digital photography and photo sharing services have had on the world of stock photography, the impact that blogging has had on the profession of journalism, or the way that services like MySpace and its successors broke something of the grip that the major labels had on music, you no longer need to be a pro to publish. There is a huge question of quality in all of this (for the two sides of the argument check out the books Wikinomics and The Cult of the Amateur).
In conversation today with a chap from a software services company that does a fair amount of work in the marketing and media sectors, it occurred to me that this might now also be happening in the worlds of advertising and marketing. There’s the somewhat faddy world of flash mobbing and crowd sourcing (witness T-Mobile’s song and dance efforts in recent years); the often blatant and unattributed ripping off of comedy memes from places like http://www.b3ta.com/; but also the really interesting area of using social networks to get peers to recommend products and services directly.
In hardened times, marketing without massive creative investment its going to be attractive. The loss of advertising as a creative, professional service sector would have potentially dreadful outcomes on or cultural life, though. There are a huge number of creative heavyweights who cut their teeth in the world of ads (or used it to make ends meet to fund their more artistic output).
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