“As clutter has increased, advertisers have responded by increasing clutter. And as with pollution, because no one owns the problem, no one is working very hard to solve it.”

“Because our needs as consumers are satisfied, we’ve stopped looking really hard for new solutions.”

“…This is a very, very big haystack, and interruption marketers don’t have that many needles. …”

“…Catch-22: The more they spend, the less it works. The less it works, the more they spend.”

“Imagine a tropical island, populated by people with simple needs and plenty of resources. You won’t find a bustling economy there.

“That’s because you need two things in order to have an economy: people who want things, and a scarcity of things they want. Without scarcity, there’s no basis for an economy.

“When there’s an abundance of any commodity, the value of that commodity plummets.

“If a commodity can be produced at will and costs little or nothing to create, it’s not likely to be scarce, either. That’s the situation with information and services today. They’re abundant and cheap. Information on the web, for example, is plentiful and free.

“…This combined shortage of time and attention is unique to today’s information age. Consumers are now willing to pay handsomely to save time, …

“The reward comes to the marketer in the form of an increased ability to concentrate on nurturing the customers who represent the quality permission candidates for future business.”

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/freeprize/