Steve Rubel on marketing pollution

Steve Rubel wrote last week about how bad marketing pollutes the social environment, calling it an all too convenient truth:

However, it’s not just the environment that is endangered by toxins. The atmosphere we breathe online is too is being threatened by pollution - from marketers. The all too convenient truth is that it’s very easy for advertisers to pollute the web with their garbage. Most often, that’s not their intent. But it’s the end result and it’s reaching an epidemic proportion. …

He’s right; for every smart marketers that understands the power of a new medium, there are ten more ready to use it to keep spewing unwanted messages at people, trying to trick them into reading messages they don’t want or care about, and so on. And it’s more than an annoyance; it degrades the medium for everybody, from users whose email boxes become spam attractors to good marketers who find truly personalized, permission-based marketing much more difficult to implement because they have to overcome the suspicions of consumers who’ve had one too many experiences with the dumb marketers. (In the case of email, that’s the ones the define “permission” as “you looked at my web site once,” and their numbers include a shocking number of major brands who ought to know better.

Whether it’s irritating attempts to get people to be “friends” with their brand of soda, comment spam on blogs, or just ads that interfere with consumption of content (hello, most major US newspapers), it all encourages users to simply stop paying attention to anything.

It’s also not just an online thing: there are plenty of people who feel like the impingement of advertising into every physical space degrades our cultural environment.

I have no simple answer for how to stop it; I’ll just observe that social media, like all the media that have come before, could fail to reach their potential - for users and for marketers - if enough clueless marketing convinces people that it’s just not that worth the effort.

But maybe someone more clever than I am has some ideas. How do you end the stream of bad marketing?

(On a related topic: This is why we can’t have nice things.)

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