So what comes after advertising (9 years later)?

Back in the early blog­ging days of 2004, I wrote a little online rant called “The Hugh­train Mani­festo”, influen­ced by all the stuff I was rea­ding at the time: Tom Peters, Seth Godin, Mark Earls, The Clue­train Mani­festo etc.

The ques­tion I was asking then was, “What comes after adver­ti­sing?” If this new Inter­net thingy meant all old-media bets were off, what would become of the Industry that drove 90% of the latter?

My ans­wer (at least to myself) came in Part Four:

“The har­dest part of a CEO’s job is sha­ring his enthu­siasm with his collea­gues, espe­cially when a lot of them are making one-fiftieth of what he is. Selling the com­pany to the gene­ral public is a piece of cake com­pa­red to selling it to the actual peo­ple who work for it. The future of adver­ti­sing is internal.”

In other words, inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion desig­ned to create real cul­tu­ral change. Arti­cu­la­ting Mark Earls’ “Purpose-Idea”. All that posi­tive dis­rup­tion for pen­nies on the dollar… com­pa­red to what you get from con­ven­tio­nal ad campaigns.

The logic being that, if you can change your own cul­ture, then you can change the cul­ture of others around you. And if you can do that, you would have a huge com­pe­ti­tive advan­tage over the other guys.

Cul­ture mat­ters. Cul­tu­ral change is big busi­ness, and get­ting big­ger by the day. It’s a huge oppor­tu­nity for adver­ti­sing folk; let’s hope some of them actually take it.