re: the first law of mass media
In another instance of pure synchronicity I read Seth Godin's post The first law of mass media on Friday morning and the same day was flummoxed by an element of a presentation i heard during a planning session for a car client.
The presenter was excited about the possibility of 'interactive' video (can't fault him there) however the examples showed were 'robot' driven pieces where the character in the vid 'answers' questions the user types in (from some kind of key word recognition gizmo that triggers answers from an FAQ database)
I questioned whether a robot answering was indeed better than a real person - there then folowed some debate about whether 'consumers' found it easy/benefitial to talk to 'real' car dealers.
If this relationship is percieved as broken then surely the task is repair the human relationship?
Seth says:
The public works tirelessly to flee to actual interactions between real people, and our organizations work even more diligently (and with more leverage) to corporatise and anonymise the interactions.
The irony, of course, is that an organization with guts can go in the opposite direction and win.
