Doc Searls speaks gospel:

As a verb market is not merely about selling. It is about convincing. Its ideal is control. This may not be what enlightened marketers want the verb to mean, but in practice that is what it has become: a tool of control by the industrial machine. That it often fails, and that good people want it to actually talk to customers, does not diminish its older and deeper intentions, which are rooted on the selling side of the axe that’s buried in all of our heads — no less deeply than the electric spikes on which the heads of the human batteries that power The Matrix are impaled.

It won’t be enough to revolt against the marketing machine. We need to build the Real World again, from the humans out to the companies that serve them. Real markets — the noun, not the verb — are what we need to strike a Neo’s bargain with the machinery of marketing. Unless we build tools for ourselves, we’ll just be talking the talk.

Particularly in the performance marketing space, we often fail at our goals because we’re looking to achieve some notion of control as implied by the use of the term “marketing” as a verb.  Instead, skip back to the possibilities of doing “marketing” in the noun or pronoun sense.

That’s rich… especially for performance marketers who work so closely (much closer than the larger agencies in glass and concrete buildings analyzing plotted graphs) with the real and live choices that human beings make.