I wanted to hightlight this post by Johnnie Moore about some ad veteran panicking about Customer-Built amateur advertising (I have a much better name for this that I don't want to give away because I want to claim it for a new project I am working on with Howard Boles.)

So, here's the post:

Tom Guarriello has a good post about Jack Trout. Jack's having a panic attack about the rise of amateur advertising.

"It's a real problem," says Jack Trout, a veteran marketing consultant at Trout & Partners, in Greenwich, Conn. "And the problem gets bigger the more people see this stuff. It begins to muddy the message." He concludes: "The ad industry should rise up against" amateur ads.

This is, as Tom says, pretty laughable stuff.

I've never been much of a fan of the Ries:Trout view of marketing as war, in which organisations attempt to own parts of our minds. It was always a bit grandiose to suggest marketing could somehow dictate the image of an organisation. These days it looks downright stupid too. As Tom puts it

Please. The power structure is obviously so threatened by what's going on out here that some of the big-timers are starting to become delerious.

My prediction related to this is: not only is amateur advertising here to stay. It won't be too amateur. Just as bloggers are challenging the news oligopoly for mindshare, bloggers (and the broader array of people creating content and publishing it online) will be competing with the big advertising not just for impressions, but for who handles the creative process.