Steve Kinney

I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s latest book, Meatball Sundae. It’s a book on marketing — more specifically “old marketing” versus “new marketing.” Godin compares old marketing to meatballs. We need meatballs, but they’re common products produced for the masses. They represent the 1960’s paradigm of owning a large factory and mass producing a product that could be sold at a low cost and flooding the market with it.

New marketing is a different beast altogether. New marketing is blogs, newsletters, viral marketing campaigns, and similar forms of communication. The main difference between the two is that old marketing works by interrupting you. It works by flashing an advertisement in from of you while you’re trying to watch Law and Order. It works by making you flip through page after page of advertisement as you look for the feature article in an issue of Rolling Stone. It works by sneaking a billboard into your peripheral vision when you looking to see if the N-train stops at the the De Kalb Avenue subway station (it doesn’t).

Over time, we’ve become incredibly good at tuning out old marketing. To add insult to injury, sites like Google have given us the ability to seek out information for ourselves instead of waiting for advertising to deliver it to our doorsteps. New marketing works on permissive marketing. Google AdWords works, because it uses the content of the page to show us ads that are relevant to our interests as opposed to the scatter shot approach found in Maxim. New marketing allows us to sign up for newsletters that will deliver relevant ads to our inbox only because we asked for it.

I think that is fair to say that children are a lot like adults – only about 50-60 times more complex. If you’re a teacher, think about the way you go about teaching. If not, try to remember what it was like to be in school. Generally speaking, would you classify it as interruption education or permissive education?

Are students pulling in information as we would pull information from a website, a blog, Wikipedia, or Google? Or do we insist on pushing our lessons onto them in a fashion similar to television? With thousands of marketing messages being pushed on kids every day, what are we doing to make sure that our lessons cut through the static and stick with our students?

In Meatball Sundae, Godin argues that the shift from old marketing to new marketing is similiar to the industrial revolution. Some companies will make it through the transition by reinventing themselves and adapting and others will miss the boat completely. Which will education choose?

As educators, we need to consider reinventing our craft for the changing paradigm.

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