Marketing is not advertising.  Marketing is not sales.  However, marketing does involve both advertising and sales.  There was a time when the company had the product.  They marketed the product through advertising and that lead to sales.  Simple, right?

But, then something strange started to happen.  Companies started to think about “access” as a conduit from consumer/customer to sale of the “product.”  We see this all the time when we’re watching NBC or another network, and see an ad for a show that’s on NBC.   We see this all the time when we see the Sunday circular for Target and it’s promoting their private label brand, Archer Farms.  We see it all the time when we see “house” ads on a website; for example ads for the Google Nexus One on Google.  These were expected and frankly, vanilla, exploitations of

And now all of a sudden we’re seeing companies rethink how to make a sale, but controlling access.  We’re all familiar with the iTunes/App store from Apple or the Kindle store from Amazon.  We’re all also familiar with how free ranging access to the movies via the web and other services like NetFlix killed Blockbuster.  Blockbuster was simply too slow to regain controls of the access.  They lost control of it and essentially moves into oblivion.

Companies are now focusing heavily on getting that first mover advantage into controlling access.  Google bought AdMob.  Apple is introducing iAds.  And now, Twitter just bought Atebits, the company who makes the popular Twitter client, Tweetie.  All of these decisions were about controlling access.

The Twitter acquisition has really pissed off a lot of people in the development community.  After all it was the development community that propelled Twitter forward.  Twitter was so slow and seemingly unable to innovate.  But, the development community filled the void.  Tools like Seesmic, Tweetdeck, Summize and of course Tweetie filled the void users had and ultimately helped Twitter grow.  The big part of the Tweetie acqusition is that Twitter will be reducing the cost of the app from $2.99 to FREE.  Talk about making that app accessible and by making it accessible they will be feeding and controlling the pipeline of people joining and using Twitter.

It’s not going to be about having a killer product anymore.  It’s going to be about controlling the access to that product.  Cable companies have known this for years and I think it’s a major reason why Comcast purchased NBC/Universal.  No longer will they just control access to every channel (aka product), but they’ll also be controlling the actual product now.  Scary or cool?

The jury is still out on that one, but there’s one thing I think we know is true.  We’re going to see a lot more of this.  Companies who want to stay on top will be looking to ensure they’re controlling access to the product.