For the past 50 or more years, advertising has been based on one basic concept: yelling at people via the television, works. You could get enough of them in one place, nice and passive, and if you delivered the right message enough times you could create awareness. From that (and I simplify) awareness led to trial, trial led to preference, preference led to loyalty. At the heart of this process were the assumptions that (a) you could get enough people in one place to allow for scale and (b) the message was for the marketer to control.
Fast forward to 2006, and that past starts to feel like a trip to Never-never Land. Companies are spending 50% or more of their ad dollars on things like paid search, the money that’s left is being cast across extremely fragmented markets, PVRs and Tivo are at long last making commercial-skipping “Me TV” a reality in a way that VCRs never really did.
Clearly, for marketers with a job to do and agencies and networks who would like to keep their jobs, this is a challenge of the first order. So what is the answer?
Well, a lot of it is just Doing More Than You Had To Before. People talk about micro-tactics and multiple small efforts, but how does that work when you need to reach tens-of-millions of people? You hear about “conversations” being important, but how do you control your message in that environment? Feels to me that you just don’t. In fact, marketing in the 21st Century is feeling more like a never-ending political campaign as set-it-and-forget-it marketing plans die as quickly as mass-reachable audiences do.
And on top of that, you have an agency and broadcasting community that seems to want to wish these changes away and just keep doing what they have always done. Kids, here’s a Handy Tip from a former Expedia guy: I’f you want to see how this movie plays out, track the travel industry since 1998. Uh huh, it’s like that.
At mesh we are tackling these topics with some of the smartest people in the field, and today Yours Truly, Mathew, Rob, Mark and Mike are joining in the discussion, too.
If you care about this topic, you can’t afford not to be at mesh. Register today.