I do agree, but I also wanna point out that back then you did not have to be a phd or a researcher to do something. You could do something in a weekend (something that people want) and then hope that you can INSANELY viral. Nowadays the small actors have it somehow worse in that respect, I feel like.
Well I dunno if we want to repeat the Web 2.0 playbook, I mean it seemed like a good idea at the time but now we have political Twitter, all the blonde women who DM me on Instagram, etc.
Recently though I've discovered a kind of hybrid real-world/social-media marketing that puts a zero on the right of all my KPIs -- I am not sure if it would work so well if I wasn't based on a college campus, but even on days when I spend only 20 minutes in public as a "foxographer"
I might get approached by several people and hand them those "tokens" which get them to subscribe to my socials and tell other people which gets more people to approach me -- it's the kind of "Flywheel" that Jim Collins talks about. Of course it "doesn't scale", and how I introduce the character to the wider community and the tourists that are all of my town in tyhe summer is TBD.
You are right on that. I just miss the way that just normal dudes could just build something and it having a good chance of becoming INSANELY viral overnight
As long as I've been involved with marketing I think most people have always underestimated the amount of work to break through indifference. If it came to putting up flyers for instance, my idea of a marketing plan is 50-1000 flyers with 5-15 distinct designs, the average young person thinks that people are so desperate to hear your message that 10 flyers will do it.
Back in the day for everything that "went viral" there were 100 "normal dudes" who had a marketing plan that involved "going viral" but it didn't happen.
People are about to learn in the AI age that: (1) if you speed up execution or the appearance of execution you run into the difficultly of marketing more quickly, and (2) Putting "AI" in your subject line will just make people close their earflaps the same way that "NFT" did two years ago.
Sure it is tuff and most people won't succeed, but with hustle and imagination some people are going to make it today, but the "life hacks" that work are either not generalizable (you are not going to transform into a fox) or trade secrets.
