Hunting The Muse

Marketing and Filtering

I was reading some comments about an essay (linked to from the comments), written by Arnold Kling. It's about Creative Commons. The essay's opinion is about how its existence solves no real problem in the inherent quality of available art. (To which I say, well, DUH... that wasn't its aim!) But a thought occurred to me:

You know, marketing means massively describing and displaying content to a large amount of folks in hopes it will stick.

Filtering means that a consumer makes his desire reach far and wide to pluck up and find only the stuff that he REALLY wants.

Often times filtering and marketing are described as converse.

Filtering means that you have to really explicitly detail your criteria so you won't get flooded. (Tangent: Isn't there something about that that just missed the point? It reduces exposure to pleasant surprises.)

But filtering means that the works you'd eventually find would have to first be exposed to your searching/filtering system. Which means that the creator has to put a lot of work into describing their work really specifically, or in such a way that it will match to a wide variety of searchers.

Which brings us back to marketing.

You know, there's some cool elements to the whole approach, but isn't it a little bit circular, too?

Create, Describe, Introduce, Sell. Traditional marketing comprises the middle two steps. The secret isn't just to cut out the manual effort of "Introduce", but also the manual effort of "Describe". Posted by Curt at January 15, 2003 04:47 PM