While mass marketers are struggling with digital technology, consumers have embraced it and taken greater control of marketing channels. Weblogs, forums, online networks, ebay accounts and MP3s were initially seen as being niche areas, but their exponential growth has left corporates wondering how to react. They know change is needed but don’t know where to start.
Jim Stengel, P&G’s marketing boss told this year’s American Association of Advertising Agencies media conference that the industry needed, ‘to embrace the urgent implications of consumer control.’
"The default position of the 30-second TV commercial, that's what I'm fighting against,” his colleague Bernard Glock, the consumer product giant’s head of global media, told this year’s Cannes Advertising Festival,
Referring to the effect of the digital era, Larry Light, McDonalds marketing chief, has declared that mass marketing no longer works and 'the end of brand positioning as we know it'.
However, while mass marketeers and their agencies struggle to turn their heavy machinery in a new direction, light-on-their-feet digital consumers are using emerging technologies in innovative ways to communicate, share information and create massive amounts of ‘audience generated content’.
We are not just talking about a remote control and a Hotmail account. Weblogs, moblogs, digital cameras, SMS, eBay, photo-phones, Kazaa, Bittorrent, 1 gigabyte memory sticks, Google Adsense, Gmail, viral, MP3, Sensecam (a badge-camera that takes 2000 pictures day) and 3.1 megapixel phones. The list goes on....
Initially, this all sounded like harmless, whacky stuff to the big guns of adland. However, consumer enthusiasm and passion for this cheap, accessible technology has blown away all the normal marketing rules, like punk’s pioneers did with cheap garage amps.
The recording industry was infamously slow to take seriously the threat of peer-to-peer MP3 networks. Kazaa and Napster were like a digital consumer boycott that forced the recording industry to its knees. Only when product sales dived did the industry start to realise the scale of change that had occurred and work with innovators like iTunes and ID2 who had recognised the trends.
Now digital consumers are using cheap weblogging software like Blogger and Typepad to move into the publishing industry. Once again, blogs have been seen as a niche activity pursued by navel-gazing geeks. However, they are growing fast. Online blog monitor Technocrati.com tracks 3 million blogs and adds 15,000 a day to its register.
And in the US, blogging is going professional. Gawker Media, has sites which attract between 300k and 500k visitors per month and advertising revenues to match. That’s bigger than a lot of media brands and at a fraction of the start-up cost.
More modest bloggers can join in too. By hooking themselves up to services like Google Adsense or media planners like BlogAds they can instantly create their own advertising revenues and earn thousands of dollars a month.
And while Yanklevich Partners report that in the US 69 per cent of consumers are interested in products and services that allow them to block, skip or opt out of advertising, people seem happy to listen to their peers. Probably because they trust them more than corporates. Jonathan Miller, Head of AOL in the US, says that 60 – 70 per cent of the time people spend on AOL is devoted to audience generated content.
For mass marketers used to the broadcast model with established metrics, players and methodologies, the switch to a world of digital consumers can seem very chaotic.
And that’s because it is. Digital consumers are busy changing the rules using cheap, accessible technology. Huge amounts of energy and passion are going into massive amounts of experimentation and innovation. Exactly the lack of rules that the corporates find so confusing is what people find such fun.
Nor does it look like stopping. Moore’s Law, that predicts the growth of computer power, states that in ten years time computers will be 10 million times more powerful than in 1975. But no more expensive. So we can assume digital consumer power isn’t going away.
What can companies do without a set of guidelines, a roadmap or precise metrics to get them going ? One approach is to accept gracefully the demise of the 30 second ad slot and join in the party!! A few intrepid organisations have already taken the plunge.
DKNY the fashion house has started producing it’s own films online, following in the footsteps of BMW.
Agent Provocateur, the lingerie company has started it’s own online record label and video production house.
Microsoft encourages 800 employees to blog (see the Scobelizer) helping to give the megacorp a more human face (not easy!).
Dr Pepper launched its Raging Cow product using a branded weblog written by teenagers for teenagers.
Some have been more successful than others but what all these companies have in common is that they know everyone is learning as they go. In this particular revolution you won’t find the answers on TV.
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