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December 3, 2009
I Am So Over YOU
In early 2005, I began writing about the “Curator Culture,” the rapid shift from one-to-many brand communication to a many-to-many world where we all “curate” on behalf of one another. The Time Magazine 2006 Person of the Year was YOU and Advertising Age made a similar choice when picking its Agency of the Year. Then came YouTube, consumer-generated everything, and a bevy of logos with smiles. Was this to be the friendly decade of YOU, where marketers fall all over themselves to acknowledge the shared provenance of today’s brands? Or, more accurately, relinquished control?
As we wind down this decade bookended with recessions, several recent campaigns just beat our collective heads against the “YOU” wall. There’s the undifferentiated Yahoo! campaign that feels strikingly like GMO’s late ‘90s “Are You Ready” campaign for Cisco. HTC has a more visually interesting YOU campaign and Microsoft is telling us that just normal folks can claim Windows 7 is “My Idea.”Enough already!
The fact that consumers bypass marketers and look to each other to curate trust is irreversible. Spending millions to remind consumers of this truism is not a positioning. Instead of price wars, it seems we now have YOU wars: “My brand is more about YOU than the other brand!”
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