Don’t spend your company’s hard-earned money on ads. Just say something interesting and give people a way to take it and run with it. Here’s the recipe:

1) Write, speak, shoot, make, paint, capture what you or your company is doing/believes/stands for. There’s no big idea here, only lots of little sweet ones.

2) Do it every day – be a curator.

3) Give your friends/audiences/critics simple ways to share your stuff and remix it into their own.

That’s the new advertising.

You should cut your online ad budget by at least 75% to start and take 25% of what you saved (or less) and use it to “find your voice,” as they say in writing class, and build a lightweight framework for sharing information.

Online ads have no future because no one pays any attention to them unless they are in a “search-or-buy” mode or the ads are micro-brewed.

Once the word gets out that the value of ads is propped up by ideas that existed before the Web – that have nothing to do with the way audiences on the Web are attracted or energized – their value is going to plummet. And won’t a lot of us be pissed that we spent tens of thousands of dollars on something we know right now doesn’t deliver.

Instead, go organic. Turn real people into the ads. Let them “Share on Tumblr,” “Snip!,” “Share on Facebook,” “Reblog.” This works great now. It will work even better on an open, smarter, more social Web (which is “already here just not evenly distributed”). Marketing via people will be the new advertising. So, think seriously about putting your time and money there now. Ads are drugs, ads are dinosaurs.

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