• by Tom Hespos , June 6, 2006

I'm not sure what gave advertisers the idea they had control in the first place. It might have been the feeling of power that comes from being ensconced in an ivory tower. Perhaps it was the team of lawyers who would fervently go after anyone who publicly took the discussion off the approved message. Or maybe it was years of traditional marketing training that dealt with reach, frequency and impressions. Whatever the case, there have been a lot of assurances to advertisers that they are somehow in control of their brand and what people think about their company and the way it does business.

Of course, there are things that can be done to steer a brand or a company in the right direction, but control is simply an illusion. Right now, off in some dark (or not so dark) corner of the Internet, some people are huddled around a virtual campfire, making fun of your commercials, of the experience they had with someone from your customer service team, or of how unbelievable your latest tagline is. Or maybe they're praising you. You probably don't know one way or the other, unless someone stumbled across the discussion in a Google search and forwarded a link to the legal department.

One theory we've seen proved beyond a shadow of a doubt in the Internet Age is that flexing political or legal muscle to force compliance with the official message has the exact opposite effect. It has the opposite effect, in part, because attempting to force compliance of thought is antithetical to the notion of freedom of thought. Different things have different meanings for different people, and when advertisers try to make an entire marketplace of people think the same thing about their brand or their company, the result is often a resounding chuckle. When that laugh reverberates online through social networking, community and discussion sites, it enrages advertisers. When advertisers try to stop it, those actions infuriate people.

If I see an ad for Acme Red Rubber Balls ("The Highest-Bouncing Rubber Balls in the World"), and I find that claim disingenuous, I might find one of their online ads, import it into Photoshop, and change the tagline to read "Acme: The Highest-Bouncing Balls Made of Stone in the World." I might post that ad to my blog to share it with some friends. Maybe we all have a laugh about it.

In the U.S., Acme would be well within its rights to sue me into next week. But we know where that path leads. When I get my legal nastygram, I'll scan it in, post it to my blog and make the whole situation much worse for Acme. I'll rant to anyone who will listen, claiming and abridgement of my free speech rights. Some people will disagree with me and a lot won't. The result will be even more damage to Acme's reputation--mostly because they can't take a joke. There is an easier way, and it involves respect for the fact that people aren't robots that think what advertisers tell them to think.

There are companies out there who have learned to embrace the fact that they don't have control. Mastercard and GM come to mind, as they've taken steps to let people put their own personal stamp on commercials and campaign ideas. But we've still got a long way to go, particularly since the default response to a loss of message control is to release the legal hounds.

The illusion of control is being dispelled, in large part due to the ways people can and do connect through the Internet.