This evening I created an advertisement, well… I got suckered into personalizing an ad and sending it to one of my friends. Meetup.com created this cute animation, and then gives you the opportunity to personalize the message to send to your friends. Pure genius! The pull-downs are so seductive that it doesn’t feel so much like an ad, but rather a way to poke fun at someone who you know would get the joke. So, I sent one message. Yes, only one. I’m sure everyone else is spamming the planet.
The amazing thing about this site is that it does exactly what Marshall McLuhan envisioned back in 1960. Shown here in a TED talk by Peter Hirshberg, McLuhan comments: “If the audience can actually become involved in the actual process of making the ad, then it’s happy.” (skip to 14:30) To describe McLuhan as a visionary is a massive understatement. I suspect that if he had time-travelled to today and seen Facebook and MySpace he would not have been surprised. The rest of Hirshberg’s talk is also really quite interesting.