Canadian Marketing Blog

Tell me I’m wrong!

The deeper we get into this cyclical (yes, Dorothy, there still is an economic cycle) recession, the more bleating I hear about changed paradigms, new economies, death of TV, death of print, and so on.

On friday afternoon I packed my brief case to go home for the weekend. I had trouble stuffing it full of the “dead medium” reading material that I receive just about every week (Marketing, Strategy, Contact Management, Applied Arts magazine, VUE (MRIA Magazine), Argyle (A lifestyle quarterly), Backbone (Business, Technology, Lifestyle), Driven (Fashion, Automobiles, Electronics, Fiction, Travel, Men’s Lifestyle), Report on Business Magazine, Midtown Post, not to mention three daily newspapers for Friday(I try to avoid the Sun on Friday). On Saturday around two hundred pages of newspaper landed on my doorstep (and I only read the Post and the Star on Saturday), and the list seems never to end.

Every one of these gems is supported to varying degrees by advertisers.

I watched the news on TV on Friday evening (twice, actually), 60 Minutes on Sunday, several Sunday Morning news shows, and, I confess, a rerun of Boston Legal on CITY. All of these are supported by advertisers. When I look out of my urban window I see, if it’s not snowing, billboards, superboards, backlit boards. All supported by advertisers. I took the subway to the movies last night and between the two I was barraged by more ads than I could count…I could go on forever, but I think you get the point.

New paradigm?

Talking of which, the Facebook site for “Advertising Week” in November, had, at its peak, 274 members: 4 news posts all describing the event; three posts to the “discussion board” all of them appearing to be ads for unrelated products and 7 posts on the wall, all of which seem to be shills posted by the organizers. The group was started at least two months ahead of the event. All of this, and Facebook is a social site, not a business site.

Which reminds me. The linked in site for the same event achieved 41 members, many of whom were speakers or presenters at the event.

If somebody doesn’t call the “experts” on their expertise soon, there will be seriously disruptive results. The marketing communication and persuasion industry is in the middle of a Tornado of cloudlike idiocy, propagated by people who should know better! So far, this has led to an obsession about measurement that will destroy strategic and advertising creativity, but not lead to any increase in business. Brand loyalty (in which, as you know, I hardly believe), or brand loyal-like behavior (in which I totally believe) will be reduced to short term bribery, and profitability and margins will be shot to hell. But mostly, we will all live in a dull, HTML driven world of bland pantone numbers, formulated letters making up “tested” sentences to "drive" immediate, "trackable", on-line behavior that matches the results predicted by the "modeling" programs..

Call me a Luddite, or anything else you want. But before you do that, prove to me that I’m wrong.

Laurence.

You’re far from being a Luddite – although I would have to say you need to embrace a more balanced perspective. The changing communication environment comes with new tools that require an understanding of when, where, how and why they should be used relative to other options – including old/mass media.

There is an important distinction that must be recognized. Both ‘worlds’ share the same advertising framework, that is to say it’s still words and/or pictures on a page, sounds or motion that convey some message. What has changed is the ability to measure and/or reach specific targets more easily. The old saying that finding customers was like trying to find a needle in a hay stack, has been replaced by having fewer, more well defined haystacks with heat seeking missiles replacing the proverbial needle.

As recently noted by Rob, QR codes are eventually going to be used on this side of the pond, which will enable advertisers to measure the impact of mass media…capture the code image and be transported to a website for more information etc… The old and new media channels have been and will always be judged on their cost effectiveness in delivering against the advertiser’s marketing objective. New media however provides an opportunity for brands to get further into the minds and lives of consumers… whether they will allow advertisers in, is a different debate.

But perhaps the most important shift in the media transformation is that the consumer is being given the ability to select what they deem to be ‘relevant’. Do not confuse the consumer use of the word with marketers’ for whom relevance is code for an enhanced (heuristic) ability to put forward a transactional offer.

Consumer relevance means that brand is only a few clicks away, 24x7. How marketers decide to use that proximity – to push or to pull is theirs to make but like you, I am leery of an over-reliance on push programs because of the virtual certainty of morphing one’s brand onto a transactional footing.

Do new media need to prove an ROI? Yes, sooner than later – and a number of them will fail during this economic downturn, just as ‘old media’ will fail. But marketers are still exploring and experimenting with different tools. Not having an immediate ROI substantiation is warranted as it’s an investment in learning and becoming better at one’s craft.

I use the word craft deliberately because as much as the science allows us to create models and execute stochastically determined (dynamic) purchase incentive programs, we are dealing with people that use logic, emotion, mob-suasion, habit and convenience as factors in their day to day decision making. That's why I think marketers need balance in their use of different tools to Communicate, provide Experiences and extend purchase Overtures - a structural model of which has been put forward on my wordpress blog - see "Anatomy Of a Brand Purchase".

Cheers,
Miro