Last night I was watching an episode of my current favorite TV show, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, after the MITX Interactive Awards ceremony - Silverscape was 1 of 5 finalists in the Consumer Goods category for the DRIFIRE website! I was watching season 3 (episode 4 if you must know) and when you start the disc it begins with one of the promotional commercials that was run before Season 3 aired. The commercial is about 45 seconds long and is a beatbox compiled from random sounds made by everyone in the gang.

What happened next is what struck me. Instead of jumping to the main menu, I sat through the commercial and – get this – I restarted the disc so that I could watch the commercial again! This seemed to me a huge breakthrough in marketing, especially what has become typical digital marketing. It got me thinking to a conversation I had with a colleague at NC State University’s business school years back. We were talking about an organization that he was involved in that was focused on finding more effective methods of guerilla marketing that would have a stronger connection with people, create buzz around an event or product, and encourage people to seek out information on things rather than forcing marketing spiels at people while they’re trying to do something else.

What Sunny did was stray from the concept of interruption marketing that seems to have become the standard in digital marketing today. Think about it: half-hour television shows account for only 22 minutes. The other eight minutes are dedicated to inconveniently-timed commercial breaks that consist of ad after ad using comedy, sex, or other innumerable tactics to hold your attention before blatantly switching to their real purpose of telling you why you should immediately buy their product or service. When did it become all about them and none about you, their alleged end-user on whose satisfaction their success depends?

Guerilla marketing or buzz marketing has started to surface a bit more frequently (as KT’s blog entry A love Letter to Hulu also touches on). I think this is a tremendous step in the way marketers are interpreting their audiences and reevaluating their intentions and perceptions by the public. After all, marketing should serve its original purpose of promoting a product, service or idea but it should be fun and engaging for the target audience too. With commercials, the brands should be competing with each other, vying for your attention and aiming to be the one that speaks best to you as a person. Or even better, what if marketers literally had to compete with each other in an interactive format? On Hulu for example, what if viewers could rate commercials and choose which types of commercials they wanted to be served? That's my idea of the future of targeted marketing.