After being turned down repeatedly for parts because she didn’t fit Hollywood’s image of what a female character should be, actress and prosumer Felicia Day created a practically no-budget web series (“The Guild”) about her own experiences as a geek. The series is now entering it’s 6th season, has reached a huge audience, and won countless awards while Day now runs a network of popular web shows.

If you gave me the opportunity to, I could gush to you forever about the papers I’ve written on the sociology of the internet –I get excited talking about the huge influence of online public spheres and the virality of social movements and attitude. But for brevity’s sake, I’ll limit my enthusiasm to one of my favourite concepts that is easily relatable to marketing: the Web 2.0 “prosumer”.

In short, we’re a long way into the era of “Web 2.0”, where web users no longer act simply as consumers of web content but producer-consumers (“prosumers”) that generate their own content for each other and with each other, including everything from blog posts and Facebook photos to web shows and software. Anyone could potentially reach a huge audience with their ideas, and the impact is awesome. If I want to watch a comedy about a bunch of socially awkward gamers and another internet user wants to produce that, it doesn’t matter that some network executive doesn’t think there’s a market for it on television; they can bring it to a web audience. A brilliant idea for a product doesn’t necessarily depend on the interest of venture capitalists anymore; thanks to crowd funding websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, innovators can go straight to interested consumers to finance their creations. The more power prosumers have to bring their ideas and content to a large audience, the less unnecessary filters there are on creativity and innovation.

And as I learn about marketing concepts in COMM 296, I constantly find myself considering the implications of prosumer-power on marketing practices and vice versa. How can marketers learn from famous prosumers (Felicia Day, Philip DeFranco, etc.) who have mastered viral marketing? How do prosumers, often with no marketing training, communicate their contents’ value as worth web users’ time? And how do marketers decide which prosumers to partner with to reach their target market?

I know I’m all-questions-no-answers on this, but I think it’s worth marketing students’ time to consider how marketing might change by the time we hit the field.

Please note: The “prosumers” that I’m referring to are not to be confused with the alternate definition of “professional-consumers”. When discussing content creation on the web, the term usually refers to “producer-consumers” rather than the aforementioned marketing segment.