Breaking The Campaign Mentality

Two conversations I've had with smart marketing folk summarise the problems that the marketing industry is trying to work through.  Last year, a savvy executive at a global, mega-FMCG company told me, 'It used to be the case that if you made three good TV campaigns, you became Marketing Director.  That's not true anymore.'  He then expanded on the point by saying that it went beyond television.  It was just that TV was the main tool in the campaigning approach historically used by the marketing industry and that this campaign mentality was the real problem.  Particularly, he added, as the mega-corp at which he plied his trade was engineered around that mentality and entirely geared up to deliver massive campaigns into the marketplace.  The problem he noted was that the consumer is fed up with being hit by huge campaigns from brands that then disappear - until the next time.  Like a lot of thorny issues in the marketing industry, as it slowly grinds away from a traditional model and searches for a new one, this all sounds in theory like a load of common sense.  In reality, however, fixing it is fiendishly complicated.  As illustrated by the second conversation with a Grand Fromage at a media company who told me about the acid test he likes to keep in mind during these exciting but challenging times.  When a brand manager goes into present the marketing plan to a buyer at Tesco's, an individual who may be responsible for the majority of the brand's distribution, what's going to cut the mustard?  An ongoing, conversational marketing programme, driven by some Facebook applications and a new blog?  Or a £25m above-the-line advertising campaign?  Whilst not as simple as all that, the scenario does highlight the problems that the marketing industry faces.  On the one hand we have a smart brand owner who knows that current practice is increasingly out-of-whack with modern day life.  On the other, a forward-thinking media man who knows that, at least in the FMCG world where the right space in the right stores is critical to the bottom line, innovation isn't *that* welcome.  Tricky, eh?

Comments

[neilperkin]

Re your point on the 'campaigning' model of advertising - for me this strikes at the heart of much of the inflexibility of current ad and agency models - I've written similar thoughts here: http://bit.ly/OA6pJ . Until they sort this one out, I'm not convinced that much about the way agencies work will truly change

[James Cherkoff]

Thanks Neil, yes I saw your post, but it does seem unlikely that agile or open source marketing will ever be picked up by the major agency networks of today. Especially when those Tesco buyers are still there to impress!

[Bruce Lewin]

James, I'm so tempted to write, tricky, but not that tricky that I will :-)

[James Cherkoff]

Excellent Bruce, so you have the answers we need? ;-)