What if you could participate in marketing?

I think most of us would agree that we are pretty much passive recipients of marketing. 99.9% of the "marketing" in the world in flying toward your face at 1,000mph from every single direction. We ran a 5k last weekend and a guy ran the whole race in a giant BMW logo suit...he was most likely paid by BMW. This sounds like an extreme example of throwing ads at customers, but its actually becoming fairly common. Even the replays on the Sunday football games are "brought to you by XYZ Corporation". The point is, it's everywhere and consumers have almost no control over how they are exposed to it.

Let's look at how this stuff gets there. In case you aren't a marketing expert, here is essentially how it works in very broad strokes: Businesses have a general idea of who they think their customers are. They do research to find out where those people go, what they do, and what they like. That company then looks for all the points where they can potentially get in front of those customers. This used to just mean on buses or billboards, but as there are more companies jockeying for space, things get crowded and some of them get clever. This is how you end up with car emblems running 5ks. Some marketing guy decided their "target customer" likes running 5k so they paid some kid to wear a suit and go for a jog. Seems silly, but it obviously got my attention.

Since we are so used to seeing ads, most of us don't even think about it anymore. Ads are just a part of life, a standard decoration on just about everything, and something we have nothing to do with. In fact, this is how most of the free things you use get paid for. Do you think watching football on Sundays is free? Not a chance. The advertising is what pays for the air time. In reality, celebrities and sports stars are valuable because they get people to watch them and thereby create opportunities to put adds in front of your eyeballs. Tricky.

But what if that wasn't how we had to think about advertising? All the companies are trying to get our attention, but something weird is going on. Instead of just asking for it, they are building all kinds  of complex models to predict what we want, how to get our attention, and how to get us to buy. What if they did something really novel to get our attention and...I don't know just asked us for it?

We are building a way for customers to become active participants in marketing. This might sound complex or boring, but its actually pretty simple. We think that instead of businesses throwing things at us, it would be much more efficient for both of us if there was a way to tell businesses what we want. Our whole goal with Scannibal is to make the conventionally obnoxious and tedious world of advertising, coupons, and loyalty programs somethings that actually creates value for everyone. Businesses don't like wasting money on spam fliers anymore than we like receiving them. There is a better way.

We are getting ready to launch our beta in the area near the University of Denver. Sign up at scannibal.com to get an invite!

Thanks for reading!