Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
24
 www.ideavirus.com
The Sad Decline of Interruption Marketing
When I first starting writing about Permission Marketing about four years ago, much of
what I said was considered heresy. “What do you mean TV ads are going to decline in
effectiveness?” “How dare you say anything negative about banner ads—of course they
work!” or “Direct mail has never been healthier!”
History, fortunately for me, has borne out my cries of doom and gloom about interruption
marketing. The TV networks are diversifying away from their traditional network TV
business as fast as they can. Banner clickthrough rates are down 85% or more. Ads are
sprouting up on the floors of the supermarket, in the elevator of the Hilton hotel in Chicago
and even in urinals. And everywhere you look, unanticipated, impersonal and irrelevant ads
are getting more expensive and less effective.
There’s a crisis in interruption marketing and it’s going to get much worse. It took more
than thirty pages to build the case against this wasteful, costly ($220 billion a year)
outmoded expense in 
Permission Marketing
, so I’ll only spend a page on it here. If you want
to read the entire jeremiad, send a note to 
[e-mail]
and I’ll send it to you for
free.
Unless you find a more cost-effective way to get your message out, your business is doomed.
You can no longer survive by interrupting strangers with a message they don’t want to hear,
about a product they’ve never heard of, using methods that annoy them. Consumers have
too little time and too much power to stand for this any longer.

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Unleashing the Ideavirus
25
 www.ideavirus.com
We Live In A Winner-Take-Almost-All World
Quick! Name an oil painting hanging in a museum somewhere in the world.
Did you say, “the Mona Lisa”?
As I walk through the Louvre, arguably one of the top ten most packed-with-high-quality-
paintings museums on the planet, I pass one empty room after another, then come to an
alcove packed with people. Why? Why are these people clawing all over each other in order
to see a painting poorly displayed behind many inches of bullet-proof glass?
The reason the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world is
that 
something 
had to be the most famous painting in the world and it
might as well be the Mona Lisa.
Busy people don’t have time to look at every painting. They only have
room in their overcrowded, media-hyped brains for a few paintings.
And when you come right down to it, most people would like to see only the “celebrity”
paintings. And just as there can only be one “My most favorite famous actress” (Julia
Roberts) and one “this site equals the Internet” (Yahoo!), there’s only room for one “most
famous painting in the world” and the safe choice is the Mona Lisa.
There’s a name for this effect. It’s called Zipf’s law, after George Kingsley Zipf (1902-1950),
a philologist and professor at Harvard University. He discovered that the most popular word
in the English language (“the”) is used ten times more than the tenth most popular word,
100 times more than the 100
th
most popular word and 1,000 times more than the 1,000
th
most popular word.

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