I dig advertising spokesmen. They’re quirky, cool, and I feel like I know each one: their personalities, what they stand for, where they work, what their voices sound like across the room. I’m not talking pitchmen, like the ShamWow guy or Billy Mays. I mean the personalities made up by creative writers. Take my insurance spokesmen, for example: I know one prefers a blue phone, another causes mayhem, and one has good hands. (I don’t mean to leave out Flo, Progressive’s spokesgal, but she’s just not my type.)

So why has the spokesperson survived the decades? They’ve been around since the 1950s with Milton Berle on the Texaco Hour, as far as I can tell. From Madge the Manicurist and Mr. Whipple in the 1970s to Joe Isuzu and PC/Mac this millennium … do they really still work?

Well, they must because they’ve lasted generations. And we all know, advertising’s gotta work if clients are going to continue to pay for it. These guys are pseudo friends to us. People try out the products, movies, and restaurants their friends recommend, and “spokesfriends” are an extension of that.

But are spokesfriends always effective? So many variables go into it, like personality appeal to the target audience, the strength of the product they’re hawking, blah, blah, blah. You’d have to ask a company’s market researchers those things. But barring all that, is it just me, or do you see an onslaught of odd or edgy spokespeople saturating the airwaves? Let’s go back to my insurance spokesfriends, for example. I know what company each one of them works for, and again, I like all of them. So check that box. But I’ll say that the only one who I remember pushing specific angles of his insurance product is The World’s Best Spokesperson In the World. He’s got a vanishing deductible something-or-other. So I suppose that when I shop for insurance, I’ll start with him first.

I guess my point is that edgy and quirky gets attention, but it’s got to follow through, and the personality has to clearly let you know why their product is better than the next seemingly identical one. Especially when your circle of spokesfriends is getting bigger and bigger. What do you want me to buy, and for how much? I know that Rosie the Waitress showed me why Bounty paper towels were the best. And in her line of work, good paper towels are major. She was much more clear and convincing than the Brawny lumberjack guy.

At Public Strategies, we work on issue-based campaigns and have seen and used many a spokesperson in our line of work. Harry and Louise have had their share of copycats. In fact, our most recent issue campaign featured “Wendy,” an average Washingtonian concerned about the possibility of a state income tax. She was relatable to most Washingtonians, and has a very straightforward message. Wendy got traction, so much so that local papers covered her. Ultimately, the state income tax was defeated. I’m not saying that she singlehandedly killed the proposal, but she had a hand in it.

So here’s the bottom line. Humanizing your product works. It doesn’t have to be a spokesperson that does it. It can be an attitude, an anecdote, whatever. A company or product does indeed need some kind of humanizing element to its pitch, but the campaign can’t lose sight of the fact that there’s a message, and call-to-action that needs to be very clear to the audience. Personality is the memory-maker. But it doesn’t change the advertising 101 fact that it’s the product or idea has to intrigue the target audience.

Speaking of intrigue … I’ve got a date with The Most Interesting Man in the World.

Is this news? Not really. But as someone who is fascinated by trying to figure out why people do the things they do online, I am intrigued. Curation is simply presenting choices around a specific topic and putting them into context. It can be automated (Pandora, Newser), manual (Huffington Post, Apple App Store) or crowd sourced (Digg, Android App Store). In all of its forms, it is about finding a trusted source that can cut through the clutter to tell me what I like and what you think I will like and give it to me in bite-sized chunks. If Facebook is curated content from people you know, then Twitter is uncurated content from people you may or may not know.

While broadcast TV, radio stations and traditional newspapers and magazines were all curated, they were built around a one to many approach. With the explosion of user-generated content from tweets to Flickr photos and Flip cam videos, the content model has changed from one to an interested few. The problem that comes with everyone being a content producer is how to manage the avalanche of content.

Smart media companies, advertisers and media professionals are the ones that will learn to embrace curation, because as Arianna Huffington has proved, you don’t have to create the new content, you just have to validate it to your audience. Becoming the trusted source for information by finding, sorting, weighting, tagging and rating relevant content is becoming as important as the content creator.