Consumers will increasingly lead your marketing

Yesterday's New York Times ran an article called Madison Avenue's 30 Second Spot Remover where it warned about the end of traditional advertising. The article, which profiled Robert Greenberg of R/GA, drew attention to the rising role that consumers play in interactive advertising.

Among the examples it cited were:

• A Nike billboard in Times Square that allows consumers to enter  commands from their cellphones to actually customize the footwear appearing on the billboard above them
• Subaru's website that lets car buyers actually "build" a car from scratch
• Response codes that are embedded on movie posters that allow trailers to be downloaded onto cellphones

One of the core messages of the article can be summed up in a quote by Mr. Greenberg himself: "The Internet is a new language because it's not linear. The novel is linear, film is linear, but the web is not."

Keep tuned in to this development in the field of marketing. More and more consumers are driving a company's marketing efforts and this trend seems to be gaining steam...