Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Through The Chaos...

When AdAge’s maverick journalist Bob Garfield rang me in 2005 to say he had been reading the manifesto I had written that February and wanted me to help him out with an article, I was both flattered and impressed.  (He could easily have pinched everything without attribution).  Garfield had created quite a storm that year on Madison Avenue with his polemic entitled: 'Chaos Scenario - A Look at the Marketing Industry's Coming Disaster'.  It was a vision of media meltdown that at the time seemed more like doom-mongering than prescience, as the world’s credit markets continued to pump out a never-ending supply of cash.  However, looking back in the context of today’s bleaker times, it isn't nearly as outrageous.  Google’s annual revenues have gone from $3bn to $20bn since Garfield’s warning note.  Meaning the company’s grip over the newspaper industry has become a stranglehold.  When a group of German publishers tried to challenge the Googleplex last week, the response from Mountain View was to the point: 'If you don't want to show up in Google search results, it doesn't require more than one or two lines of code,' blogged a Google executive in response.  Going on to add the chilling reminder for those tempted to actually add the innocuous script that: 'Google delivers more than a billion consumer visits to newspaper web sites each month.'   This unenviable pinch between Google’s rock and the hard place of Craig’s List has of course left many famous US newspapers reeling.  And now the pain is being felt in the UK too.  Most notably in TV where analysts are no longer mincing their words: 'This is horrible, a worrying sign that we didn’t want that perhaps the issue is structural and not just cyclical due to the recession.'  Garfield’s doomsday scenario did in fact end on a high: 'What emerges from the ruins will be superior in every way to what it replaced. Better for marketers, better for the economy'.  And the follow-up essay (the one I helped out with): 'Inside the New World of Listenomics - How the Open Source Revolution Impacts Your Brands,' was an upbeat assessment of what lay beyond the chaos, including many forecasts that have come to fruition.  Fast forward to today and Garfield’s ongoing assessment of the emerging media world can be found on his new blog, 'The Chaos Scenario' - to which he has asked me to contribute.  The aim of the blog is to move the conversation on beyond the doom and gloom that everyone is feeling today - as well as help sell his book!  'The question for business – as well as government, religion, science, politics, academia and every other institution hitherto operated from the top down – is what to do now,' Garfield writes.  Don't you agree...?

Behavioural Advertising Is Here Right?

Remember when Gmail launched in 2004 and there was an outcry because Google would be matching adverts to what people wrote in their emails?  At the time the BBC even found someone called Simon Davies, from something called Privacy International, to describe the proposed system as, "a vast violation of European law".  Then what happened?  We all started using it, realised it was really good and never gave the privacy issue a second thought.  Now nearly 150 million people use Gmail each month to communicate about important business issues and to share details about their personal lives with friends and family.  And occasionally you might notice that as you write an email, associated adverts appear, some of which may be helpful.  Earlier this year, I saw the ever-insightful Peter Bazelgette describe at a NESTA event how he thought that in the future content will be paid for, "with attention and access to personal data."  And that we would all just get over the privacy issues.  So is that it?  The old ‘value exchange’ in media was - we provide you cheap-ish, good quality media as long you agree to also watch or read a few ads along the way.  The new version is - we’ll provide you free, good quality media as long as you share a few details about yourself, aka ‘behavioural advertising’.  In fact, as Gmail shows, it’s already here in Gibsonesque style.  However, for many it’s still a sensitive issue that needs to be carefully handled.  So probably best if you don’t call your company something that sounds like a new flu virus or describe its role in a way that brings to mind an intimate medical routine.  Indeed, now that about one-fifth of all Internet users have Facebook accounts, and practically live within Zuckerberg’s walls, sharing about 4 billion pieces of information per month between them, I think it’s fair to say that the whole privacy argument has moved on.  People aren't exactly shy on the web these days.  The final step towards a behavioural world looks to be Google’s plan to link DoubleClick, the massive ad serving network it bought last year, with its search index and then roll out behavioural display advertising.  Which will probably leave everyone up in arms and Disgraced of Tunbridge Wells in a state of total outrage.  Until they forget all about it and accept that it’s actually just fine.  And at that point, the oldest problem in advertising, will have been solved. Right?

This Time It's Different

The Grand Fromages of media and marketing seem to have agreed that this recession is in fact a chance to 'reset' the industry.  By which, I think they mean, finally ditch old-fashioned processes and assumptions and define a new path in line with a digital world, where the majority of content is being produced by the people who used to just consume.  In fact, this has been the Grand Fromage soundbite of choice for quite sometime.  In practice it will (still) all come down to that old integration business.  But not the type of integration where a major network agency pays top dollar for a digital ninja to wheel out in client meetings, only to then pop them back in their playpen while the grown-ups go and make some TV ads.  Oh no.  This time it's different. Why?  Because the clients say so.  As Brandweek notes:  "The recession is also putting more pressure than ever on the age-old challenge for marketers: integration. All of the panelists expressed some level of frustration that they couldn't better integrate campaigns with their disparate agencies. The blame ends up lying on old structures. Clients have their own silos that don't communicate well, which is matched on the agency side. When integration does happen, the client executives said, it pays off in spades."  We understand the agencies say.  We will change.  Never again will we reach for the warm fuzzy haze of TV advertising.  We do understand that our previous behaviour has been unacceptable and occasionally destructive.  Please give us another chance.  This time it's different.