China’s Communist Party falls for Party Prank


Title*

North Korea’s top leader named The Onion’s Sexiest Man Alive for 2012

It happened again. Content marketing rules.

We thought, innocently, perhaps naively, that once the US Presidential Election was over that we would resort to the world in which intelligence, thinking, logic, reasoning would prevail.

And along with the passing of the first week of November we probably also thought:

  • we would finally have that Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving,
  • we wouldn’t succumb to commercialism and shop the black Friday madness, and
  • we would definitely, this year, we would support our small businesses by shopping locally on Small Business Saturday, even though that was started by American Express, likely to increase their take on the day because small businesses pay higher percentages and it worked out well because it made them appear to be considerate of small businesses.

Riiight. How’d that all work out?

It appears the fabled carriage has turned back into the pumpkin it really is, and we have awoken from the post-election commercial free-glow to this silly little world we live in.

Thinking had not returned.

I need to cling to the belief that it did, in fact, exist. Therefore I must blame this new reality on the prolonged campaigning season. It is the only thing on our calendars that is longer than the Christmas shopping season, and is responsible for the thought-sucking, face value acceptance of lies and half truths, refusal and condemnation of the thinking process, and the devaluation of logic, reason and fact, to the levels of heresy. Most importantly humor slid off the cliff.

If you want to attract lemmings, give ’em a cliff.

(see, if you still have thinking in you, that right there made you think and chuckle at the current political state … if not, well,  …. might as well stop by Colorado or Washington. Game over.)

But it’s not just the isolated, ideologically devoid of humor communists who fail to recognize satire in it’s glory and get caught in the trap of believing what they read and becoming lazy and not thinking for themselves.

Here’s what happens if you stop thinking. You find you probably don’t know what sexy means if you believe that is the sexiest man alive. You find that you no longer think, have your own identity, and that you are missing out on some of the best content, art, and talent that marketing can give us.

Content is a powerful thing, but like anything else, including data, it should not be taken on face value. Get the message and then absorb it, and contemplate it, and take what fits, leave what doesn’t.

Please. I beg you. As a Marketer. Give me an audience to market to, and not just a bland bunch of hungry birds waiting for the next morsel of information to devour whole, without tasting and enjoying, because it’s that bit of food that you don’t question that feeds you, instead of nourishes you. Don’t make it easy to automate content.

Challenge me. Think for yourself.