Leo Burnett, one of the world’s biggest advertising agencies, has urged marketers to learn from consumer-created content on websites such as YouTube.com, which now has greater reach among some US audiences than MTV, the music broadcaster, the Financial Times reports.

The FT quotes Mark Tutssel, worldwide chief creative officer at Leo Burnett:

[…] Marketers must learn to let go of the control they think they have over their brand…. Once consumers have interacted with brands they will not go back to being shouted at by marketers.

That reflects some of the commentary I heard in New York earlier this month from quite a few marketers at the 2006 Innovative Marketing Conference. You can hear such thinking in many of the FIR podcast interviews Shel and I did at that event.

It looks like things are really beginning to wake up.