I’ve spent plenty of time blogging about Budget’s groundbreaking blog-only Up Your Budget campaign that ran last fall. The attention was well-deserved, if for no other reason than the historical significance of the campaign, as well as its spectacular results. But there’s another reason to sing the praises of Budget’s campaign. And we see it everyday. Many advertisers portray their customers as idiots. The examples come to our mind early and often. Maybe it’s the guy that gets stuck/locked in an air vent chasing a credit card bill. Or maybe it’s the father that tells his family to call him on their cell phones, then realizes that no one in the family actually has a cell phone. Kodak engaging in assvertising? The fat idiot in the Capital One commercials that never can figure out that ‘the answer’s always NO’? Hell even this year’s Advertising Week used this compelling visual argument for why you should attend the event. Budget’s Up Your Budget campaign was so significant because it totally reversed this trend. Budget made their customers partners in spreading their message. Basically, they told bloggers “Here’s what we are doing, here’s why we think you should care. If you agree that what we are doing is interesting, please help spread our message”. What Budget did, in a year where many companies told their customers that they were too stupid to realize that they thought of them as idiots, was tell their customers that they looked at them as equals. And furthermore, were going to trust them to help spread their message for their company. As Adrants recently posted “If people feel they are being talked down to or made to look dumb, they’ll think you (marketer, agency) are dumb too.” And in this case, the exact opposite is true. Budget is looking very smart right now.