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I believe that Seth Godin is probably the greatest thinker in marketing today. He manages to capture the zeitgeist of the times, where our attention is more precious than ever, and the most important thing a marketer can get is our permission to have a conversation.

Thanks to the wonder of video on the web, we have access to some great conference talks that would cost thousands of dollars to go see in person (if we could get in at all). The TED Conferences bring together some of the world’s greatest ideasmiths to present, and they are nice enough to post much of this material online where we can all enjoy it.

Here’s Seth’s talk from 2003 about the kinds of marketing ideas that get our attention, and why as he puts it, being safe is risky.

People came home after World War II, got houses, kids, moved to the suburbs, and got 9 to 5 jobs. The nice thing about a 9-5 job is it generally leaves your evenings free. With new technology and modern conveniences, we were no longer washing clothes by hand until nightfall. Suddenly we had a lot of leisure time on our hands. For the most part, we filled that time vacuum by watching television.

On January 19th, 1953, Lucille Ball went to the hospital on “I Love Lucy”. 44 million people tuned in to watch, 71.1% of all television households in America watched that show, with 20 million TV households. When Elvis appeared on Ed Sullivan in 1956, 60 million people (82.6% of houses with a TV) sat down to watch. Truly mass media arrived in time to fill that leftover leisure time.

But today, something is changing.

Clay Shirky, a adjunct professor at NYU, stood up at the Web 2.0 conference last week and gave a speech entitled Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.

He talks about the “cognitive surplus” that happens when societies change. In the 20th century that surplus was taken up by television. People are now moving away from TV and towards becoming an active part of communities online. When only a small amount of time is taken away from our collective TV watching, we can together create things like Wikipedia.

Read the article, an excellent and fascinating take on the changes going on around us.

Vancouver realtor Ian Watt is using video, and the time available in his car, to market his real estate offerings. In these videos, we get a little real estate tip, but more importantly get a sense of who Ian is and whether he’s someone we could work with when buying our next obscenely expensive condo in the best part of Canada.

It works in a couple of ways

1. It’s immediate – Ian can record and post a video very quickly, allowing him to make timely comments about the market or current news.

2. It’s personal – No script, no makeup, very informal. You come away with the sense this is really the guy you’re dealing with.

3. It’s effective – By using Vimeo, the quality of video and audio is pretty amazing considering the environment is his car.

I worry about the implications of people broadcasting video from their moving car, but Ian is on the right track here.

Check out his videos here.

Cute video about viral marketing. Afterall, we do love the recommendation of a friend.

View on Youtube here

This weekend I happened to be in Dallas, TX to work a Canucks and Stars game on Saturday night. We stayed at the Hyatt downtown. I got there about 6pm on Friday, and got up to my room to see the view. Right outside my hotel room window a few minute walk away was the infamous book depository from where Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK.

Setting off in the 88 degree heat of the early evening, I headed over to have a look, meeting up with one of my co-workers along the way.

The site is basically an intersection on the north side of an elevated rail line. The site is a park called Dealey Plaza, with some plaques around that explain where the motorcade route was. We headed over to where the shooting took place. You stand on the side of the road, on the left is the book depository, on the right is the grassy knoll. In the middle of the street are 2 ‘X’s where the bullets hit. On the sidewalk are a few conspiracy theorists selling newspapers, but overall it’s just a small, quiet park on a well used thoroughfare. The most interesting part wasn’t the site itself, but the people who were there.

There are some steps on the side of the grassy knoll where people can sit. There must have been 15 or 20 people there having a look around. The younger people were looking around and chatting as they theorized about whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald could have squeezed off those shots in that small of a space that quickly. But there was a marked difference with the older people who came.

Many of them were just sitting and silently lost in thought as they gazed upon the place where JFK was gunned down. For them, it was a real memory, one of those things where you knew where you were and exactly what you were doing when you heard the news. The spot has a real effect on people, taking them right back to that day almost 45 years ago.

Their memories aren’t necessarily about what happened at that spot, but about their own personal experience of that event. Many would have been school children, being gathered in a hasty school assembly and sent home for the day. Many were at home watching a teary Walter Cronkite. The image of John Jr. saluting the funeral procession. At that spot, the communal experience of the assassination blended with the personal memories.

Often times we make too much of celebrities in our culture. But today, these are often the people who also become part of our daily experience through the power of mass media. Most of the time it’s trivial, but in some places, like sitting on the grassy knoll on Friday, it truly is a part of our lives.