Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Rise Of The DIY Superstar

"They're all MySpace bands," my niece told me over Christmas when describing her favourite current music, "no one listens to that stuff".  The 'stuff' she was referring to was the BBC's Top 40.  One thing I'll be looking out for in the coming year is more DIY Superstars.  By that I mean talented individuals who are using the web to create an audience, without relying on traditional institutions.  We've already seen examples of talented individuals creating an audience but they have been the exception not the rule.  There's a simple reason for this.  It's bloody hard to do and only a few trailblazers have got the guts.  However, as the old guard get more desperate and the web becomes more mainstream, innovative support structures are appearing that will make it easier for DIY Superstars to flourish.  Talking Heads frontman David Byrne lays out the new music industry landscape in this brilliant Wired article.  "What do record companies do? Or, more precisely, what did they do?," he asks.  However, it's not just the music industry that's feeling the force of economic change, as old-school shackles look less appealing and new ways to get paid appear.  Of course, like every other debate about web-powered change, the old guard won't die completely.  Most will look increasingly battered and withered while a few will rejuvenate themselves by buying into the new markets.  But for modern marketers the opportunities will be plenty.  Because, as we all know, talent creates audiences which creates media which creates customers.  And that's why in 2008 I'll be following my niece's advice.

[UPDATE: Meanwhile Warner is the latest major, shocked at the realisation that Steve Jobs is a) clever and b) self-interested, to throw themselves at Amazon, dropping their DRM knickers on the way!  But you don't understand Jeff's not like Steve!]   

The Official Line

The Official Line (TOL) has always been a powerful, if rather illusory, concept within corporations and organisations.  However, networked media environments have made it increasingly tricky to pin down.  In a distant age, TOL was very easy to define because it was whatever The Official Gatekeeper said it should be.  And if anyone challenged that view, it was quite easy to find the source and take suitably decisive action to keep others on their toes.  But these days the porous walls of multinationals and other mega-orgs mean TOL is becoming increasingly harder to hold - or even identify in the first place.  It's become more of A Blurry Line that people can interpret as they wish.  For instance, if a small business unit creates a blog that deepens valuable relationships with suppliers or customers, its very presence may puncture the sense of reassaurance that TOL brings to head office, regardless of what is actually being said.  Because blogs and other social media create that enticing sense of private conversations going public they tend not to go down very well with The Official Gatekeepers.  And often for good reason, especially if the company involved is subject to regulation of any kind.  So what to do?  Well, it's terribly easy to blame it on some subset of the emerging techno-mosh-pit such as 'the bloggers'.  But they are as an illusory bunch as TOL itself.  For having moved beyond the initial excitement about micro-publishing and social networking, we see that these new technologies are merely uncovering behaviour and opinions that have long been in existence.  People have always held strong views, disagreed, competed, plotted, been indiscreet or just plain dumb.  However, previously the hullabaloo of the internal bazaar was given a thorough mouthwash and became the sweet choral purity of The Official Line by the time it went public.  But these days TOL doesn't sound so pure and at worst can sound like a spivvy sales spin.  And that is why companies trying to hold TOL are finding it so hard.  But not as hard as the creeping sense that the answer has nothing to do with networked media itself.  As the walls begin to crumble, the only factor that will bring back the reassurance of TOL is increased trust levels that traditional hierachies have previously just enforced.  And without such trust, The Official Line will blur and blur until it just fades away completely.

Marketing Is Dead, Long Live Marketing

The idea of marketing dying is a joke.  As human societies we will always trade and therefore always need markets.  However, their nature is undergoing total redesign and that is why it's soooo interesting to be involved in marketing right now.  Of course, what people rail against are the techniques associated with the particular marketplace forged in an industrial hearth and then exported around the world through newly globalised capital.  We all know what this mall looks like.  But we now have a wide range of established bazaars that look nothing like the global brand cathedrals of StarBucks, McDs, Tescos and Wal-Mart.  Amazon has created a $38bn market by focusing on never-ending niches of the longtail.  eBay created $45bn worth of value by letting people swap the content of their attics. Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis created enterprise-weight P2P software that meant people could bypass traditional markets altogether and do it themselves with Kazaa, Skype and Joost.  And, of course, Google created a new market by studying what people were doing on the open web, organising it with PageRank and raiding the world's advertising palaces to underwrite its eye-watering growth.  And now we have Etsy.  The values behind this almost totally female marketplace are laid out brilliantly by the NYT.  Robert Kalin's vision is remarkable - and highly successful to the tune of $4m a month in revenues.  But it's the way in which Etsy taps into people's distrust of the bland global mall-model that's the secret sauce.  "The women who have led the craft movement don’t want to work for the Man. But many are also motivated by having reached adulthood at a time when the Man is slashing benefits, reneging on pensions, laying people off and, if hiring, is looking for customer-service reps and baristas. This is not a utopian alt-youth framework; it’s a very real-world, alt-grown-up framework."  Reminds me of another market-buster I know....

The End Of The Beginning?

Is it just me, or is there now a consensus in the world of marketing about the future?  Lots of the ideas that seemed radical a few years ago are now accepted as the norm.  And many disruptive trends are now presumed to be long-term change.  For instance, the idea that television must be reinvented or die is hardly worth the breath and, hey, did you know people don't like interruptive marketing techniques?  Search (aka The Database of Intentions) is now more than just a handy function but the way we organise our lives.  Also, now that everyone is joined up outside of traditional institutions, it's clear that people regard peers as the purest form of accurate information.  Then there's Moore's Law which has re-engineered our homes into powerful nodes on a never-ending network.  And Open Source.  No longer a niche for the sandal-brigade but just the way that alpha-programmers go about creating the websites we all love.  Yes, we like choice in the way we use content but more than that we enjoy the freedom to pursue our own passions with like-minded folk - however niche.  Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue have locked horns in a battle that will probably rage for a decade, while social networks, having rejigged our perceptions about what public life is, are quickly morphing into media empires that fight for the services of the best creative writers, filmmakers and musicians.  Many of whom are the best of the next generation.  Even the path to real metrics is becoming clearer.  So all the big building blocks are roughly in place.  Right?  But where does this leave the humble modern marketeer?  Well, that really depends on the individual.  In my experience the people who came into the world of marketing because...

Brain Fuel Part 5

As we wind down towards Christmas and start thinking about a New Year, it's a good time to pay attention to some fresh influences and brain fuel.  Or in other words, as the jugs of ale begin to flow and no one can think straight, let me offer a few morsels to get your addled grey matter moving.  Here's Phillipe Starck in a brilliant talk at TED.  It's worth it just to hear him deliver this line: "No one is obliged to be a genius, but everyone is obliged to participate."  Secondly, I really enjoyed listening to John 'Search' Battelle return to Berkeley to talk to some students about the Web 1.0/2.0 story (scroll down to Dec 3) as well as the births of Wired, Boing-Boing and the ad banner.  Next, and it might help to have a jug or two handy for this one, take a look at this essay about the economist Joseph Schumpeter whose ideas about capitalism being driven by a process of Creative Destruction fit so easily into the era of the Fanning Effect - via Memex 1.1.  And, finally, here's a video of a baby laughing at Wii golf.  Enjoy.