The Future of MarCom and Media: Mad Men Meets Silicon Valley?
“The truth is, advertisers and brand marketers are entering a brave new world — one where code is on par with content. The 21st-century ad isn’t something to be looked at, it’s something to be used… …”Consumers” are now “Users.” So are “Marketers” now “Developers”?”
“…having someone who at least can help a creative team understanding how the software should look is very helpful. “I think having somebody like that, even if they are not the ones coding the app, helps bridge the gap between the technical and the creative…”
Source: AdAge – Agencies Need to Think Like Software Companies
Business Value = Subscribers * Demographics
Business Value = Eyeballs + relevance * intent
Last week’s talk of the town among media in crowd and digerati was that spending on Online Marketing in the UK finally has taken pole position from Offline Advertising.
Make no mistake: this is significant. (Remember this is BBC territory!)
For years eyeballs, attention and now -as predicted and long overdue- budget weight have shifted from TV, Radio and Print to Interactive Media, culminating in this milestone.
Why this change from spending budget on Offline Advertising to investing in Online Marketing Strategies?
And why this plea to repurpose the inner workings of agencies (and ASAP at that)?
Well, to answer the first question, here’s a list of activities people in general are currently undertaking (online) instead of massively tuning in on prime-time (or, indeed, instead of buying and reading newspapers) like they used to:
- Checking news anytime, online, for free;
- Discovering and consuming online content, via “Social Distribution”, for free;
- Shopping online, any time they like;
- Spending days on end playing videogames;
- Spending evenings (cocooning with friends or family) watching TiVo or DVD’s;
- Leaving comments and reviewing products on that very same e-commerce site;
- Discussing and reviewing artists, movies, products and brands on niche online communities;
- Logging in daily to update their status in social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook (or even several times a day – thanks to mobile flat-rate data plans and apt mobile devices and smart phones such as Apple’s iPhone, RIM’s BlackBerry and the Nokia N series, to name but a few).
Okay, I’m bound to have missed many, many more, yet even the online media consumption / activities I’ve inevitably missed, share core characteristics with the ones mentioned above, which, when indentified and aligned next to each other, should underline my statement that agencies need some unadulterated tech DNA should they hope to help their clients connect online with their audience.
“Creatives need to be specialists in the spaces where consumers live that are defined by new technology.”
“If agencies are to continue to offer the highest value to their clients, and realize the full potential of new media on behalf of their clients, they need to make sure every department is as technology literate as consumers” -Simon Mainwaring
So, why the need for new fresh Silicon Valley Blood for agencies in this post-Madison Avenue MarCom ecosystem? Well, for starters, all the activities mentioned above:
- are On Demand;
- are personalized;
- are ubiquitous;
- are interactive (vs. passive content consumption);
- put the user in control;
-And… they’ve become a habit.
Habits slowly but steadily ingraining themselves in modern culture on a global scale.
All of these activities have replaced, or are in the process of replacing, the habit of, say, going home after school or work, watching the same mass orientated, one-size-fits-all TV shows like the rest of the populous, within timeslots deemed fit by a few network coordinators, all the while zapping away the interruption marketed ads…
(On a side note, what has also been replaced is blindly following the opinion of a select few elitists, or opinion leaders, so you will. You don’t need (trust?) one or more reporters from the New York Times to tell you that The Dark Knight or District 9 are movies worth an evening out to the multiplex, what book is a must-read or which restaurant should be on your shortlist, as even more so than usual, nowadays people are forming their own opinion by reading online peer reviews or discussing their customer care experience online, no holds barred.
Internet killed the middleman.
And the platforms facilitating this have a reach of millions and sometimes even billions, globally.
This continuous two-way online dialogue is another reason why the one-way message sending, branding specialists need to acquire interactive skill- and mindsets…)
It’s The Internet, Stupid
“Why doesn’t the traditional model work online? In short, the web is too fragmented (millions of videos, millions of web sites), too loosely coupled (countless hyperlinks, embed codes, APIs), and too nascent (too few revenue models, too little clarity about the future) to fit comfortably into a media conglomerate as they exist today.”
“The challenge is that the scarce resources are different: while the media business continues to rely on “talent,” today’s talent may be writing code rather than screenplays. Distribution still creates value, but it can mean a quickly passed link on Twitter or Facebook instead of an 8 p.m. slot on a broadcast network”.
Source: Giga Om – New Media Demands a New Kind of Media Company
But these factors are not the only causes for this disruptive re-allocating of budget.
Sure, everyone agrees that you should “fish where the fish are”, but the main reason that budgets are finally being freed up from political unwillingness or irrational conservatism, is that in these times of crises, true accountability in marketing and advertising has finally become key.
There’s no need for (hiding behind) second guessing or causality in MarCom anymore: Plausible effective advertising maybe was “fine” yesterday, today proven effectiveness by conversion is vast becoming the golden standard.
The current recession has acted as a catalyst for this silk media revolution, merely accelerating the inevitable.
Now the marketer finally knows which half of her marketing euro, dollar, yen or what have you, is wasted on naught and which half is an investment; generating leads or spurring your core hyper targeted audience into action. All in real-time, if necessary, meaning you can act real-time.
“It’s to no fault that many account teams have no concept of what web development entails in terms of budget and time. Too many times there are promises made that cannot be fulfilled. Having a cross functional, technically savvy professional on hand to lay out accurate budget and time frames in real time ensures that the client is not mislead by a traditional account person reliant on third party estimates.”
It’s no longer about the clever award winning Creative Director and his team of witty art-director/copywriter duo’s.
This also means that the sole focus in marketing and advertising isn’t about “sending content” anymore, but it’s about the underlying technologies that facilitate dialogue between brand and stakeholders, and empowers them both.
It’s about, for example, creating branded tools that might prove useful in everyday mundane tasks for the user: Apps-as-a-Brand-Utility. Eyeballs. Attention.
“Code” and “(meta)data” have earned their rightful place next to “design” and “gut-feeling”, thus switching the demand from pure creative output to actionable insights based on real-time data; apps and open platforms for effective communication, feedback and co-creation. All of this fundamentally challenging the very raison d’être and modus operandi of traditional agencies.
“Various models have evolved over the years but the successful ones have at their core a few talented individuals who “get it” when it comes to the nuts and bolts of technology, the subtleties of strategic brand building and the figures that justify an ROI…
…the more multidisciplinary people an agency can employ without forcing generalists into specialized silos, the better equipped they’ll be to provide true integration.”
As it is becoming increasingly clear that consumers are changing their daily work-, leisure- and decision-making(!) systematic from Analogue- to Digital based; brands/advertisers and traditional MarCom specialists will have to adapt & change their Tech know-how (what vs. why), their thought patterns (creative top-down factories vs. embracing digital natives and co-creating), and their priorities (branding vs. true empirical accountability) to match this new reality or ultimately end up like that frog in the slow-boiling pan.
The long-term solution however, is not going to be purely a technological one, but rather an anthropological and sociological one; the real challenge lies in the cultural change and organizational restructuring needed to save traditional agencies from the same dark fate (or worse) as the music industry and newspaper & magazine publishers. Out with the old…
[Yes, the very fact that it’s 2009 and I’m posting this rant as being new(s), means that somehow there’s still a need for summaries and musings like this, however obvious and stale it might seem to fellow digital natives and digerati in-crowd alike. Yet, I believe that this needs to be heard and echoed. I’m merely trying to add a drip in the quite -possible very pretentious- hope all the accumulated drips will eventually flood the ivory tower of cognitive dissonance that some board rooms and CEO’s (across all traditional agencies and entertainment outlets) dwell in.]
Read more thoughts about Apps-as-a-Brand-Utility, the future of advertising, “Creative Technologists” and the ideal DNA composition for successful marketers and agencies in the 21st Century in this excellent article by Allison Mooney on Advertising Age.
SoundCloud.com Social Media Done Right (or About Being Authentic)
Every once in a while something comes along that just… Works.
It can be a product or a service that manages to captivate you just for its sheer brilliance. Not by throwing around zillions of options and other complicated stuff, but by being functional and simple. Really simple. What’s even more rare to discover is a concept that is -in your eyes- so special that it needs to be heard, seen and talked about. Directly.
That something just came along for me a few minutes ago and I just had to share my thoughts on it and what this means for you, your product or service and your organization.
In this case it’s a website for people that like to dabble with producing music, either as a bedroom-producer or as a pro. As some of you may know, I’m quite the audiophile, so when I read about SoundCloud.com and their waveform-annotation concept on SignalvsNoise (37Signals Blog) this afternoon I just had to go and check it out. Serendipity soon followed :)
Note that I was at first purely and only interested by the waveform comment stream idea, wherein you see a visual of a WAV-file and friends or collaborators can leave time based comments on the spot, so the artist gets feedback on exactly which parts of a song sound cool and which parts need, say, a little more mastering to make the bass come out louder etc., etc. This can be shared privately or made public. Already big EDM names such as Funk D’void are using this service and having worked in this industry myself I can assure you that it will be picked up very soon by their respective followers.
What struck me as a huge surprise was not only the user friendliness of the site, both in design and in UI, but also the way the site communicates with me as a prospect. If I was a person who happened to be inexperienced with browsing the internet or using apps, this site would be happy to just gently guide me through the whole process, from the beginning. The funny thing is, the very core audience of this service is very tech- and web savvy!
The size of the fonts are big so I don’t need to squint to see them clearly, the color scheme and lay-out are clutter free and logical; the user is guided through a flowing process. In short: the usability is tops and I haven’t even started to use the service that this site was built for!
Now the thing that really was the icing on the cake for me was that when I went to my account preferences (first thing I always do when signing up for a new service since it contains the privacy settings etc.,) it gave me two relevant fields to fill in: My Discogs.com account and my MySpace artist account.
Bang! “The devil is in the detail”. In that instant moment you just know that this site hasn’t been made or thought up by cynical marketers, but that it was crafted by people who’re obsessed with music just like me and with a lot of LOVE. Aesthetically and conceptually everything fits together. Make no mistake; insiders recognize this kind of dedication and true devotion from miles away: in other words it’s authentic.
Take away: You can’t create authenticity by pushing a button or hiring a nifty PR spokesperson or consulting firm. You either are perceived by an audience as authentic or not, despite the fact that some marketers and self-proclaimed gurus would have the more gullible amongst us believe otherwise…
If you already know this, then why is that you’re still doing the opposite?
Marketing Shortcut of The Week
Repeat after me: In connecting with the consumer there are no shortcuts. PR Week reports on Web ‘fakery’ law change.
In a nutshell it finally puts an end to sock-puppeting and astro-turfing, in the UK. Now the following is wishful thinking on my part, but wouldn’t it be nice if this law could be instated as a standard all across the world?
The only negative point I can raise regarding this new regulation, is the very fact that’s it’s a law and thus that the industry failed to be self-regulatory: Aside from the moral stance we can take in this as honest, progressive thinking digerati AND as a consumer -e.g. that it’s wrong for a company or organization to lie and deceive or manipulate the very people that they’d want to sustainably connect with- I find it actually almost unbelievable that there are still marketers/strategists and indeed organizations out there today who are willing to use such methods! Forgotten how for example Sony’s attempt to do so with a PSP-Blog backfired immensely on them a few years back?
Question: Do you enjoy it when you find out that someone you trust has cheated or lied to you and that they did this just because they thought they could and to selfishly further their own good? Thought so. As a human being you don’t like being cheated, nobody does, and since you’re trying -on behalf of your organization- to connect with other human beings, act concordantly. You’re the professional who knows what he or she is talking about when it comes to connecting with the consumers, so convince PR, Branding, Strategy, The Board, the CEO… Whoever gave out the order, why this is akin to shooting yourself in the foot with a bazooka and then show them the alternatives that do work.
“Oh so now it’s about 2.0 and connecting, and we’re a bit low on budget, so I have this great idea: Weblogs and forums are considered 2.0 and those flashy sites are about communicating, but people are posting all kinds of negative comments about our customer service and all, so why don’t we start a conversation there? The catch is; we’re the only participants and by “we” I actually mean “me”: I’ll post a topic and then I’ll post all the comments! This way we’re on the cutting edge of communication in the middle of our target audience AND we’re still in control of our brand.”
Sorry pal, but you’re not in control of your brand. You never have been actually, only now with the advent of the internet and social media this wisdom has become more apparent, a commodity.
“I’m talking zero investment here: Only a few man-hours to write the script and post it and maybe a little monitoring afterwards, the remaining budget can go to banner placements in context with the posts; surefire traffic I’m telling ya!”</Insert Sly Wink here>
Dude this is going to cost you and your brand more than just the low budget, especially in the mid- and long-term, you’re going to look at a negative ROI.
“Huh? B-but… We’re connecting right? We’re not just “sending” anymore and -and hey we’re broadcasting on the Social Media! …Err Right?”
Newsflash: It’s about communicating and connecting with your target audience in an authentic way and hopefully conquering their minds and hearts leading to the possibility that they may become, over time, your ambassador, so you can then empower them to do so in ways that they deem most fit. In all honesty and openness.
But of course to do that, you’d need at least two crucial things: First; an open minded, progressive thinking marketer/strategist and second; a product or service that doesn’t suck. And though you may not see the effects or end results immediately, if either of these two key components is missing, than your organization is in deep serious trouble. Thing is, the trouble doesn’t always come as a bang, but could just as well creep up as a whisper and no cheap postings on user-forum and blogs is going to silence or stop either of them…
As always a sense of urgency always comes when it’s either too late or unnecessary damage has already been done. A real shame, more so because thinking about authentic ways to enthuse the consumer is actually a lot of fun and, if it works, worth a whole lot more to brag about at birthday parties afterwards ;)
People first, Product second
Please read this post on Seth’s blog first: The statesman, the lawyer and the marketer, or: how Seth Godin is hitting the nail on the head yet again and probably much to the chagrin of most conservative CEO’s, marketers and organizations.
His latest article represents, I believe, the fundamental challenge that awaits marketers and organizations here and across the Big Pond in the coming time. The problem here is, as Seth noticed in concluding his article, how to get your organization, CEO and shareholders behind this way of thinking, because in all honesty though it’s not a radical new philosophy on how to run a business and sell your product, it’s still not common practice.
The proof is in the pudding as they say, so my bet is as follows; should one or two leading companies or upcoming start-ups prove to successfully harness this mindset on how to run a business and manage marketing as a whole, others will have no choice but to start taking notice in order to be able to compete.
Unless of course we’re both wrong and marketers would rather be (or stay) lawyers…
