There are a few benefits to age and experience. And in the analyst business, experience is the best antidote to the we’re-all-breathing-our-own-exhaust phenomena that routinely come out of Silicon Valley. It’s usually a variation of pop psychology and fuzzy social sciences, and everybody starts putting it into their presentations.

Last year, it was targeting — the rationale that people really want advertising as long as it’s the right advertising.

The current fog centers around social networks, key influencers and word-of-mouth marketing. And it’s reaching levels of hyperbole.

Part of the issue is that there is plenty of anecdotal, fuzzy science that tells a story that people want to hear. They want to believe in The Tipping Point, and more precisely, they want to sell the services that connect marketers with these audiences of key influencers. I won’t re-hash Clive Thompson’s Wired article entitled Is The Tipping Point Toast? but the work that Duncan Watts has been doing is an interesting inquiry into the nature and repeatability of social phenomena.

And repeatability is the key. If the influence of social networks is repeatable, then it can be an effective part of a marketing campaign. If not, we’re simply guessing and hoping that the scatter shot will work.

Lately, I’ve been overwhelmed with briefings about widgets, gidgets and widget ad networks, and they’re all starting to look the same to me — with someone slapping a name and gimmick around the same old ad inventory that publishers have been selling for years. This time around, the ad is a widget that people can put on their pages, and that’s supposed to lend credibility to advertising that would otherwise be a mere annoyance.

I agree that people like to share and that sharing is a valuable way to communicate. But let’s not kid ourselves. Until someone demonstrates how to repeatably and consistently build viral campaigns – and we can all agree on objective measures of success – we’re still clogging the channel with advertising and calling it by a different name.