Interruption is a staple of any consumer marketing. Marketers interrupt television shows with commericals. Billboards interrupt your drive to and from work. Spam interrupts your e-mail inbox.

Here’s the rub: consumers are building up strong interruption immunity. You see on average 4,000 interruption messages a day. How many do you remember from yesterday? (We remember this one out of the thousands we saw.)

We’re moving very quickly from a world where we demand simultaneous attention from a group of people to a world where we earn attention one person at a time.

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by Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson is the editor of Wired and author of the The Long Tail, a best-seller about the Internet economy.

Free! is his exploration of the past, present, and future of free as a business model.  Anderson provides a retrospective of free, including King Gillette’s marketing revelation to give away razors in order to sell disposable blades, and the rise of advertising to support free media.  Anderson also delves into Google’s business model and explains how the search-engine giant can afford to give away applications, virtually unlimited e-mail, free 411 services, etc. to improve its ad sales.

Sticking with his theme, Anderson has made the entire book available for free as  a downloadable audiobook.

(The complete book is available as a free e-book on scribd.com, but scribd was having technical difficulties at the time of distribution.)

Read more about Free! on publishing veteran Rex Hammock’s
blog.

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The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR by Al Ries and Laura Ries

Attempting to convince your target audience of your brand’s claims through paid space or time lacks a key ingredient vital to success — credibility.

As customers we’re cynical, suspicious, and cautious. We see the majority of advertising as biased, self-serving, and company-oriented rather than consumer-oriented. So we turn to independent, authoritative, third-party sources for recommendations and advice — friends, relatives, neighbors, and the media. When we’ve made up our minds, advertising serves as a reminder.

That’s the main conclusion and key piece of advice in The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR, a book just published by US-based marketing guru Al Ries and his daughter, Laura Ries.

The book highlights how companies like Dell, Starbucks, and Krispy Kreme used PR to create their brand.

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3. Free! The Future of a Radical Price

http://www.marketingprofs.com/

This website bills itself as specialists “in providing both strategic and tactical marketing know-how to Internet and offline marketing professionals through a combination of provocative articles and commentary.”

The site is an excellent resource of information and commentary about marketing. Recent tutorials include “Power Writing for the Web: 10 Golden Rules” and “Does Advertising Even Work?” Marketing professionals also provide insightful perspectives about a number of marketing topics from website optimization to public relations to advertising.

Marketingprofs.com offers free membership and a bimonthly broadcast e-mail about the latest editions to the site.

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