My take on happenings in the world of marketing. Not to mention anything else that sparks my mind...
(Don't worry if you don't get the title, it's a Gen Y thing)
A week ago, I came across an article published by Ad Age about how some agencies have dropped off a bit and aren’t necessarily performing up to clients’ standards.In my opinion, if agencies aren’t so vital to clients anymore, it’s their own fault. However, this has a negative effect on all agencies and the industry as a whole. This got me thinking about a list of “commandments” that I have from a great marketer, Martin MacDonald, and how he would correct this debacle.
As some of you reading this may or may not know, a few weeks ago was Martin MacDonald’s birthday. Unfortunately, he was taken from us too soon and his loved ones weren’t able to celebrate it with him. For those of you who don’t know, and as those who knew him can attest, Martin was a great marketer and an even greater person. I had the pleasure of meeting and spending some time with him when I was a teen living in Dallas, TX. He worked with my father, Mark Miller, at Rapp, a successful marketing/ad agency. While I will unfortunately never have the chance to work with him, the fact that he has had such an influence on my blossoming marketing career demonstrates how truly impactful his personality and creativity was.
If all of us were to take the approach to marketing and the workplace environment that Martin displays below (whether we’re creative or not) and apply those concepts to both life and marketing, I whole-heartedly believe that agencies would become indispensible and flourish.
(Click to expand image)
I’ve had teachers, executives, and HR managers all tell me this semester how great it is that I have all this energy and passion for marketing and its practices; they attribute it to my youth and my readiness to apply what I’ve learned. While those may be true, what I really hope is that I can maintain that energy and passion throughout my career and that the print-out of Martin’s words-of-wisdom taped to my work station will help to keep me on that track.
It's kind of strange to think that the bulk of the internet has really only been around for just over fifteen years. During that time, the web has developed into something massive, both on a scale of seemingly endless cyber space and with the sheer magnitude of processed executed over it. By 2007, the average consumer was devoting 23% of his/her media consumption to online channels[i]. As one might expect, that number has since increased. While all of this is fantastic for both consumers and marketers, it does create a problem that has plagued marketers for years: clutter (cue ominous music).
Web 2.0, with all of its P2P, blogs, Wiki pages, Twitter, clouds, avatars, widgets, RSS feeds, video channels, MySpace and Facebook capabilities, has changed marketing and its processes drastically. However, all of these platforms have caused Web 2.0 to walk down a similar, cluttered path as its one-dimensional ancestors: print media, radio, and television. Let’s look at it this way, consumers are besieged with over 5000 advertising messages a day[ii]. Consumers either choose to block out these messages or are completely averse to them. Despite what some people may say (cough cough, the know-it-all kid in my International Marketing class in the 3rd row), the consumer is smart and is constantly looking to avoid these messages. This means that marketers have to find creative and innovative ways to reach them with their messages. Gone are the days when you could expect people to pay attention to billboards, print ads, and TV commercials. Online, it’s becoming the exact same way: “Banner blindness” has caused the number of people who clicked on the ad to fall from its high of .75% in 2006 to below .18%[iii]. Additionally, users are becoming more and more frustrated with mandatory ads, such as pre-roll advertisements on YouTube. It doesn’t matter the size of your budget or the frequency with which you bombard the market with your messages; what matters is engaging the audience. Otherwise, all you’re doing is spending a lot of money to have messages fall on deaf ears and blind eyes.
Furthermore, consumers don’t care about what companies say about their product, they care about what their peers are saying about it. People pay much more attention to “Likes” and Tweets from friends than what’s in a commercial slot. With e-commerce, people look at ratings and recommendations instead taking the manufacturer’s word for it. The best organizations are the ones who have figured out effective ways to hone in on this data and measure it. Those are the companies that understand their consumer and what it takes to reach them. Domino’s (I know, this is like the 3rd Domino’s reference in the last 4 blogs, sorry) has done a fantastic job of locking on to peer evaluations of their products and taking progressive steps from there. But how does a company or agency ensure that their ads are in the miniscule 1-3% of advertising messages that are actually remembered?[iv] Interaction and engagement. It sounds so simple, but that’s because it is. That’s what makes Web 2.0 so revolutionary, unlike other media, it provides the opportunity for marketers and companies to actually establish direct communication with the market on a mass scale. In order to be successful, companies need to take advantage of it.
Let’s take a look at Nike and what they did with its soccer division. It created a campaign, known as The Chance, where Nike took submissions from amateur players all over the world and selected the best to receive a chance for trial periods with professional soccer clubs across the world. Nike bludgeoned its website, Facebook, and Twitter mediums, as any company would and should do, but then they went a little off the beaten path by developing a phone app, YouTube series, and got the consumers involved directly. Each of these facets allowed the masses to follow their favorite player and actually interact with them throughout the process. Additionally, Nike did a fantastic job of interacting with followers through social media regarding voting sessions about favorite players, drills the players would participate in, and other interactive applications. This allowed people to feel as if they were part of the process and had an influence on it. On a similar note, why is American Idol so successful? Because the people’s vote counts for something and people believe they have an influence on the outcome. Same principle here with The Chance. Nike was able to effectively break through media clutter and utilize different mediums to interact with the market, generate buzz, and get their message across.
How Nike "Writes the future"...
Media clutter has, and probably always will be a problem for marketers, no matter what format is used. What is important is determining ways to avoid that traffic and to be able to get the message through to consumers without getting lost in the muck. Some of the most effective ways to do that are: using mediums in an innovative fashion, engaging the market, and giving them a chance to participate. Things have been changing since the introduction of Web 2.0, and I couldn’t begin to tell you where we’ll be in the next fifteen years as marketers or consumers. But as Madonna so nearly sang 20+ years ago, “We are living in a digital world, and I am just a digital girl” (Get it? It’s a spin-off of her song “Material Girl”. Get it? Nevermind…)
