Like information, marketing wants to be free. While Stewart Brand’s aphorism has become a slogan of software and music piraters, in its original context his statement was a bit more nuanced:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

There are similar forces at work driving the cost of marketing down. Primary among them is the fact that we can efficiently target large numbers of people at an increasingly lower cost. In many cases, the cost of the medium itself has arrived at zero – for example email, internet video and social networking. Many new businesses are getting the word out by leveraging these new, free media, such as the much-publicized story of the Kogi Korean food truck in Los Angeles. Ironically, even advertising giant Google spends shockingly little on advertising, counting instead on the market to spread the word virally because their services are so useful.

One of the top viral videos of the last week, courtesy of Visible Measures. Sadly, internet video is characterized by a preponderance of babies and kittens.

But as with information, marketing can also be valuable and people will pay for value. Google is creating value by being useful – arguably the Google search engine itself is a form of marketing, since it only generates revenue by helping Google serve more ads. And there is still a great deal of value in storytelling, a fact we internet marketers often forget.

I should also say that my point-of-view here is self-serving. I’ve spent most of my career helping marketers spend less. I believe that the current state of the advertising services industry is outdated. Much of the revenue generated by agencies is tied to how much of their client’s money they can spend on advertising media. Since the cost of media no longer correlates to the effectiveness of media, this model needs to change.

As marketers we can help navigate this change by helping businesses create value rather than buy media. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, but the relationship is much more tenuous than it used to be.

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