I haven't really paid much attention to this ChangeThis manifesto title, until I spoke with its author, James Cherkoff of Collaborate Marketing.

With the flood of books and other material still on my plate, and not to mention all of the work I'm already falling behind with, the short premise of the manifesto just didn't do it for me. And what a mistake turned that out to be.

On just 15 pages, James takes the open source philosophy we know from Linux and applies it to the marketing world, giving us what we need to know to survive in the marketing world of today.

The essential problem, according to James, is the change in consumer attitudes:

"Today's consumer is unrecognisable from even just twenty years ago. More savvy, more skeptical, wealthier, better informed, less deferential and generally more in control. The advertising industry, however, is still largely using tactics that were created in the 1950s, like the 30-second ad slot. The result is that consumers find advertising irrelevant, or even irritating, and are increasingly using technology like PVRs to filter it out of their lives.

That's not to say that people aren't interested in brands and products. And companies are obviously just as keen to find new customers. People just find the old-school techniques out-of-sync with their lifestyles, and advertisers want to excite people about their brands, not annoy them.

All quite a conundrum for the marketing industry, a global business worth $370 billion in 2004. Clearly, marketing isn't going to disappear. It existed before the TV schedule and will continue as long as markets themselves. The question is, where can the industry turn to reignite its passion?

The answer lies in a phenomenon which demonstrates all the energy, innovation and excitement that TV brought to people in the 1950s: the Open Source Movement (OSM)."

I'll let you read the rest by yourselves. Click here.