Last Friday I whisked off and caught a marketing seminar for corporate bigwigs at venerable Columbia University.  The seminar's nearly useless title was "The New PR", and as it took place at the VERY end of a long, lovely Friday, half of the attendees were a tad tipsy from lunchtime anti-teetotaling.  This made for a frank, whimsical, often rambling discussion by a bunch of PR veterans about what the heck they were going to do about this "internet" stuff.
In all fairness, many attendees were tech-savvy and eager to gobble up any insights into that web thing that they could.  An uncomfortable majority, however, piped up regularly with ideas about how marketers and PR gurus could wrest control of our current cultural marketing discourse from bloggers, MySpace, and the like.  As ideas about viral marketing and grass-roots publishing were bandied about, hand after hand shot up hoping to interject with an idea about how to thwart this wired tide of philistine publicists and their crude, sometimes troublesome, entirely untamed opinions.

One anachronist in particular sticks out in my memory- in the face of a discussion about blogging corporate executives, this one fellow offered that neither the public nor executives could be entrusted with the idea of shaping a brand.  To him, the virtues of anything that you'd find in your local market weren't open for debate; Madison Avenue, which should be well compensated for its autocracy, should determine them.

Well, isn't that just the cutest thing?  It's like he was standing in the middle of 5th avenue during the Puerto Rican Day parade directing pedestrian traffic!  There's no way that ANYbody could ever fight a tide so strong as the Puerto Rican Day parade, and there's no way anybody's going to stop the web.

There are questions in my mind about whether or not marketing trends are progressive (like, they just constantly keep moving and changing), or they're cyclical (as in, one day snake-oil salesmen will be all the rage all over again), or what.  But to my mind, right now with blogs being just that easy to publish and MySpace accounts pushing more mail than the post office, there's simply no competing with grass roots marketers.  At lest on a price per hit basis.  That said, Coca-Cola still wins every battle, right or wrong.