The stating-the-obvious police are going to slap me upside the head for this, but it has to be said: change is happening at an insanely rapid pace. Seriously, take a look around; change is everywhere. Leaves are blown, not raked. Randy Moss played on three NFL teams in six weeks. Mutts are now “puggles” or “labradoodles.” Starbucks is going to serve wine. The World Series lost to Dancing With the Stars in the TV ratings. Badly. Eminem complains that hip-hop videos are too sexually explicit. Is this a crazy-ass world, or what?

Of course, technology (specifically the Web) is leading the way. The entire contents of the Library of Congress fits on an iPad. Elections are called based on Twitter trending. India is snapping up 1MM mobile phones a month. Kids are watching The Office and Glee online instead of on TV. The two-year-old laptop I’m typing this on is frigging obsolete. 

It’s a whole new (strikingly digital) ballgame.

And nowhere has the pace of change been faster than in marketing. Social media has caused a seismic shift in the way we think of reaching customers and prospects, and the allocation of marketing resources. 

And although there is a faddishness to some of the so-called breakthroughs (see Second Life, and several hundred iPhone apps, including the one that lets you pour a glass of beer as you tilt the phone right to left), there is no doubting the transcendent power of being able to have a one-to-one conversation with consumers in real time with video, sound and an electronic shopping cart. And being able to join and control the conversation and stimulate pass-along messaging among groups of friends online, well, that’s downright intoxicating to marketers. Okay, honestly, intoxicating is really too soft a word. It’s more like a marketer’s Happy Meal consisting of ecstasy and crystal meth.

(Oh, and now that you can measure the ROI of a social media strategy … well, this is just about the greatest marketing invention since the 1-800 number. Rumor is that a handful of CMOs actually smiled for a second or two last week for the first time in three years.)

But for all those ginormous gushers of change, hard as it may be to believe, there are a few things that do remain approximately the same. The Yankees missed another World Series with their $250 million payroll. Yellow snow is bad for you. Taxes suck. No one knows what’s in Funyuns. That kind of thing.

Here’s a marketing constant: People will click on the stuff that interests them. Not so much anything else, especially if it’s boring. A Volkswagen ad from the sixties, a white-mail offer from AT&T in the eighties, a J. Peterman catalog in the nineties — if it’s worth their while, consumers will open it, read it, watch it, recommend it, and nowadays, click on it. Same as it ever was.

Which brings me to the erstwhile Breakfast Of Champions. The pre-HGH, -steroids, -clear-and-the-cream version, that is.

Good ol’ Wheaties.

They recently launched a new product called Wheaties Fuel. The graphics are actually quite nice, a slick look that pays homage to the Gatorade (or “G”) and Right Guard brands, especially ‘cause they loaded up on celebrity jock endorsers like Peyton Manning. The microsite has the new graphics, the obligatory product story (complete with a scientist in a lab coat), and some blah-blah-blah about nutrients and riboflavin, and implies that if you’d only eat Wheaties, you could get that extra zip on the ball that will help you avoid becoming an insurance salesman and be able to throw the pigskin like number 18. There are also some goofy videos of Peyton and other athletes touring the Wheaties laboratory and attempting to crack wise. In fairness, 20 years ago, the videos would have been mildly innovative.

You can also follow Fuel on Twitter, though I’m not quite sure why you’d want to. Click the Facebook button and you’re taken to the Facebook page for Fuel. This is where the effort falls completely apart for me.

There are postings/comments on the Facebook page, at the breathless rate of one every other week or so. Scroll down a screen and the posts are from July and about Albert Pujols. The “likes” are in the vicinity of from six to thirty. Not exactly earth-shattering – and probably not very cost effective, either. There is a fairly large graphic featuring a coupon for $1 off a box of Fuel (a decent amount), and under this it looks like the site has gained 32,000+ followers. This just proves my point … give customers what they want and they’ll respond. Especially if it’s money.

The 32,000+ number may have been aided by some of those coupon sites that post the best deals out there in the cybermarket. And it seems like that number may be reasonably satisfactory from a client objectives point of view. But just for the heck of it, I Googled one of the Old Spice commercials, and guess what. It had over 23 million views. I was yakking with some of the Old Spice team members recently, and they told me that OS year-over-year sales are up 107%. And their Facebook comments get “like this” numbers that average around 2,000. (They did a Facebook / Twitter event where the Old Spice guy replied to comments in almost real time — with a video. A team from Wieden + Kennedy monitored peoples’ tweets, then would write, rehearse, shoot, and post video replies about an hour later. Some of the people who commented and “received” video answers were celebrities, including presidential advisor George Stefanapoulos.

Oh, and unlike Wheaties’ posts (which were usually forgettable inquiries about last night’s football game, or the amount of protein in a single serving, the Old Spice posts had something of value — usually entertainment. Like the OS guy asking: “Do all these muscles make me look fat?” 4,185 people liked that.

The numbers don’t lie. People like what they like. And don’t pay attention to blather.

To sum up, the more things change, the more some of them don’t budge a millimeter. Tell a story. Deliver a pleasant experience. Offer something of value. People will respond. It was true in print, radio, TV, guerilla, point-of-sale, and out-of-home. And it’s especially true online.

I could be wrong. Fat chance.