I was watching an interview of Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.  Jimmy was talking about some cultural trends and the shifts in marketing.  In the past, the name of the game was to spend as much money on advertisements as possible, throw the ads at as many people as possible (who were predictably sitting in front of the tube), funnel in some customers, make some money, and reinvest the profits into buying more advertisements.  The rules have changed and it’s very exciting.  In the past, it was the mega media companies that held a monopoly over information and ideas.  If your ideas didn’t get air time, you never gained any traction.

Now, average people have considerable power to aggregate and spread ideas.  When Senator John Edwards announced his decision to run for president (pre-sex scandal), he did it via YouTube, a technology that’s available to everyone.  Jimmy Wales was talking about the importance of ease-of-transfer for ideas to effectively spread.  The idea needs to be cool, useful and appeal to people’s selfish motives.  Seth Godin wrote a great book on this titled “Unleashing the Ideavirus.”  Awesome book.

I hate to keep referencing this guy, but his campaign is brilliant.  Instead of raising taxes on people he’s raising taxes on companies.  Fred Thompson put it well last night when he said, “He’s not going to siphon water from your side of the bucket, he’s going to suck it from the other side…”  And he’s right.  But the story of “I’m not going to raise taxes for you common folks” is what’s spreading and will keep spreading because it’s an easy idea to understand and one that appeals to people’s selfish motives (”I’m going to save money if I elect Obama”).  The Republican counter that taxing companies will affect working people (because companies will have less net revenue to pay employees)  will not spread as fast.  It needs an explanation, it requires a little bit of thought and it’s not as soluble.  Instead, the Republican party needs a similar play-action pass, a ploy if you will.  And they need to think of something fast.

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