Wired to Participate

How the Oldest Human Instinct Will Define the Future of Marketing

The age of persuasion has reached its apex: the future of marketing will be true, meaningful participation.

In Wired to Participate, Christian Jacobsen, co-founder of The Many, shares the groundbreaking paradigm he’s arrived at through a thirty-year career as a marketing creative, entrepreneur, and brand and business strategist. It’s no longer adequate for advertisers to focus on sales and conversions. For continued relevance today, brands, organizations, and causes must learn to harness the oldest human instinct, the instinct that called our ancestors to gather around the tribal fire: participation. As Jacobsen lays it out, participatory marketing invites a natural, self-reinforcing progression from observation to contribution and co-creation. It culminates in a tribal sense of belonging that flourishes independently of the brand’s control.

This book is an eye-opener for creative professionals navigating a time of extreme turbulence, brought on by the decline of traditional media, the democratization of social media, and the disruption of AI. It draws insights from a century of marketing history and Jacobsen’s own storied career, which began on Madison Avenue and took him through the halls of Ogilvy, Lowe, and Red Bull’s agency Kastner & Partners, as well as evolutionary theory, psychology, and neuroscience. If persuasion can now be algorithmically microtargeted, what value does the creative professional bring to the table?

Christian Jacobsen proposes a Participation Flywheel™ that accesses deeply wired human needs that haven’t changed for 300,000 years. The participatory imperative has been breaking through in popular culture in disconnected fits and starts. Wired to Participate is an invitation to engage in it with intention and awareness. Applying the insights of participatory marketing will free creatives to build fires worth gathering around, fires that nurture loyalty, community, belonging, and transformation.