Bold thinking essential to build brands to broadband world

Published 1:29 pm Tuesday, September 2, 2008

The media world is going through an explosive period of innovation and change. The ways that marketers can touch consumers are expanding faster than our ability to fully grasp the implications. Companies are faced with a tougher job of managing multiple ways to interact with consumers.

Growing, too, are the ways that consumers can avoid commercial messages. Consumer attitudes are changing about “being marketed to,” and successful marketers of the future will be more concerned about what a consumer experiences at each point of contact than they will be concerned about traditional “brand” message.

For all but the largest brand advertisers, the proliferation of consumer channels can eat up budgets, and marketers can lose visibility and perceived leadership unless carefully managed. Companies have complex choices to make in deciding where to focus their communication dollars to reach the best audience in ways that prompt action. This necessitates marketing departments organizing around new market realities and away from individual departments that encourage silos in thinking. There must be no distinction between brand advertising, direct marketing, online marketing or sales promotion.

The advertising industry is still organized around a service delivery model that is based on broad-based, commission-driven media. Few major advertising agency groups are organized in a way to take advantage of emerging opportunities in unpaid media. Most are still organized in specialty silos, and people are rewarded for their operational profits. This discourages critical teamwork across disciplines for providing the best possible strategies to maximize a client’s return on communication dollars spent.

The advertising industry ultimately will evolve into some form of multimedia-strategy teams that will be deployed to help companies create marketplace strategies that are media-agnostic. This will necessitate new forms of compensation that don’t reward the wrong choices. The best creative people in the industry will be expert at developing total solution campaigns with superb handshakes between television, radio, Web site, viral, paid and unpaid search, direct mail, retail and sales promotion.

Today, 51 million American households have broadband connections at home. Within two years this will grow dramatically. The new media reality is that more people will interact with a brand online than will see commercials on television. Traditional media buying will give way to far more strategic thinking that balances paid media with viral and online support. Agencies that are not lean, strategic, energetic and adaptable will struggle to survive. Those who embrace the changes and adapt to new organizational models will thrive.

Clients and agencies alike have got a lot of work to do to encourage bold and aggressive thinking. Yet bold thinking may be just the thing that will ensure marketing leaders will keep their jobs in our increasingly competitive world. Case in point: The lead story in the June 19, 2006, edition of Advertising Age declared that chief marketing officers today have just 23 months to live. Success in this crucible can only be achieved by boldness.

James Gilmore, co-author of “The Experience Economy,” spoke recently at a conference of independent advertising agencies from around the globe. According to Gilmore, it is no longer enough for companies to simply provide superior products or services and sprinkle in some advertising to attract a market. With so many technology tools at consumers’ disposal for comparative shopping, more and more products and services are becoming commodities. In this view, brand is less a thing that is made by advertising and more about what consumers experience at each touch-point with a company.

“The Experience Economy” argues that companies must provide unusual “experiences,” or “theater,” that will touch consumers more powerfully than advertising alone can do.

Today, consumers interact with companies in a host of ways, mostly driven by the consumer.

Google searches can be very helpful in gathering information before making purchases. Information gained in this way is not all driven by the marketing department. Unhappy customers now have a voice through consumer blogs, and this can easily turn up in a product search. Marketing departments now need to be carefully scanning the Internet weekly to monitor consumer sentiment that can be helpful, or harmful, to their efforts.

It isn’t unusual for people to conduct product research online only to make actual purchases at retail. This blurs the line between Web sales and retail sales and necessitates well-coordinated strategies across department lines. It also changes the parameters for retail sales training.

Break down those walls in your marketing departments and in your advertising agencies to create high-impact, memorable and meaningful new media combinations that deliver powerful results.

Bill Fritsch, a longtime leader in Seattle’s ad industry, is president of Hydrogen. Call him at 206-389-9500, Ext. 224, or send e-mail to bill@hydrogenadvertising.com.