Permission Marketing: The Difference Between Interrupting and Being Invited
Seth Godin coined the term "permission marketing" in 1999, and it describes a distinction that still organizes a good part of digital marketing today: there's marketing that interrupts someone who didn't ask for it, and there's marketing that earned the right to keep talking to someone.
An ad in the middle of a video, a pop-up, a cold call — all of that interrupts a person who didn't ask for that contact at that moment. An email someone voluntarily subscribed to, a profile they chose to follow, content they actively sought out — that's permission: they agreed to keep listening.
The practical difference isn't just ethical, it's about results: a message with permission gets a much higher attention rate than an interruption, because the person already showed interest before receiving the content.
The point Godin insists on, and that most people forget after earning initial permission, is that it needs to be renewed with every contact. Permission isn't a permanent state earned once — it's something maintained contact after contact, as each message keeps being worth the reader's time. When the content stops delivering value, permission gets silently canceled: the person keeps following, but stops paying attention.