Nothing New Under The Sun

For a long time the marketing industry closed its eyes to the impact of networked media.  And while it looked the other way, Messrs Brin & Page ate its lunch and built the largest media company in the world.  Over the last year or so, however, possibly because of the Google experience, the marketing industry has done a U-turn and the consensus is now that the world has indeed changed forever.  So which view is right?  Unsurprisingly, the reality is somewhere in between.  A thread of my client work over the last few years has been challenging the notion that the maturing web means we should forget everything we’ve ever known and start again.  Forget the idea of brands, stop using TV as a medium, assume that the customer has morphed into a new type of being, accept that complete transparency is the only choice, believe that the only workable price point is free.  Only a total reboot will do, some claim.  However, this binary view of the world overlooks that while much has changed, more has stayed the same.  Corporations are still operating in markets where consumers are looking for value and trustworthy suppliers.  People are still motivated by the same needs – keeping up with the Jones’, caring for their families, exploring the world, self-expression, ambition, fun.  It’s just that the markets they use to find satisfaction have been rewired. ‘The problems which are not changing are human problems - which remain the same,’ noted Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google last year.  Take for instance, the social net de jour - Chatroulette.  It’s a perfect example of the many new wonderful and unexpected things that are emerging as a result of open networked media and widespread broadband access.  Built by an individual, using powerful distributed technology that now sits in bedrooms all around the world, it offers a P2P-experience that undermines traditional views of private and public identity and drives new types of social interaction.  And what is this remarkable bleeding-edge innovation used for?  Letting young men check out hot girls!  Whizzy new kit, same old motivations.  However, that's not to underestimate the ingenuity and scale of the new markets that people will build when they find their needs unmet.  I was lucky enough to meet Douglas Rushkoff last week and hear him speak about his belief that...

...our relationship with money has broken.  He described it by saying that today’s markets don’t work well because they are built on financial exchange systems from another era.  Drawing on a technical analogy he commented that we are trying to run modern applications on an outdated operating system.  Rushkoff suggested that people are aware of this and becoming fed up of using a financial system designed by the feudal lords and abused by the Masters of the Universe.  So to meet their needs they are turning to new means of exchange created by the web that Rushkoff calls 'private currencies'.  Such talk may sound crazy but the growth of Zopa, the rise of virtual currencies, and P2P markets like CraigsList and even Betfair suggests Rushkoff might be onto something.

Rushkoff's ideas can easily be applied to the marketing industry, where $500bn is being invested every year by brands into a system that was designed by the Mad Men.  One dominated by convoluted media metrics and ever more opaque econometrics to demonstrate its relevance to the real world.  But while adding software patches to Madioson Avenue's mainframe may prevent the machine from falling over, it can’t disguise the fact that it was designed to power steam engines not maglev bullet trains.  And so ordinary individuals are increasingly blocking out the Mad Men media and taking it upon themselves to create new social markets where traded opinion provides clarity about brands, products and commercial value (aka the share-and-compare economy). 

Marketing is about markets.  And markets are about people satisfying their needs using the technology at hand.  The explosion of activity on the web is just about people looking for better solutions to their problems.  In that sense, there's nothing new under the sun.

Comments

[Chris Bird]

All, I wanted to do after reading this interesting piece was tweet it. Can't find an easy way to do that. Sure, I could copy and paste the url and that would have been quicker than whining about it.

However, it illustrates that we really do need to put lots of methods of dissemination on our pieces if we desire wide readership.

We can't assume that any reader will have an aggregator, nor want one. We want to use the tools that are familiar to us.

If there is a twitter button, I couldn't locate it :-( So apologies if I missed it!

[James Cherkoff]

Hi Chris, glad you liked it... ;-)