On Friday, I participated in a very interesting working session with marketing professionals of large worldwide consumer brands (unfortunately I can't say much about it) but the theme was taken from the title of Sergio Zyman's book "The end of marketing as we know it".
I was about to order the book following that session but the reviews on Amazon don't look that good. Anyway, our discussions were very intense and of course we talked about blogging all the time.
Traditional marketing methods have appeared just because the only media possible have been mass, one to many media. Now that there is so much marketing around (even in toilets), now that the devices that record your TV and delete the ads appear everywhere, it is becoming much more difficult for marketers to get their message to their customers. They all recognize that they have a very small idea about how efficient is their marketing budget. Think about sponsoring a Formula One event, how do you measure anything ?
If you think about the long tail, blogging is the same phenomenon as the music creation described in the article. With blogging, everybody can express his opinion or passion. We know it, the audience of weblogs is getting higher and higher, but it is highly fragmented. Of course there are nodes, but most of the audience is on the tail, because it is much more important for you to read your close friend than to watch CNN, to learn about your passion on somebody blogging about it than to read, say, a sports monthly mag.
It is a new challenge to marketers. Buying 30 seconds ads was easy, being present on millions of micro sources, identifying the ones that matter to the brand, communicating in an efficient way with these people, is a totally different story. It is not about putting an ad anymore, it is about treating customers and potential customers as partners.
How do you see marketing practice evolving ?
The Vichy case study is the first (and probably european) example of a brand that uses a blog as a pure marketing tool and gets "attacked" by the blogosphere. Shel had written all the details. As I am being asked very often the orginal screenshot of the blog as it was and I'm getting tired of sending it by email, here it is once and for all. The blog Le Journal de ma peau is still online but asleep. L'Oreal had reacted very fast to the criticism, and turned it into a positive experience. Disclosure: I advised L'Oréal when the mini-crisis happened.
After Kryptonite, it is now Kensington lock's turn. The blogosphere 
