David Cushman has sparked an interesting debate on his Faster Future blog. His post discusses the future of advertising and marketing and is worth a read.
I added my own thoughts as follows:
We need to view the digital advertising universe under its primary headings of search, classifieds, response and brand advertising.
Search marketing is at the beginning of its life cycle and we should anticipate increasing sophistication in this pull-marketing model where brands can monetise this "database of intentions".
Classifieds are already moving to the world you describe, they are fundamentally p-p marketing and we are seeing blurring with C2C marketing and "the consumer as a channel". This is a really interesting space to watch and an illustration of how old business models are being intermediated by new players like Craigslist and Ebay.
Display advertising (which on the web is primarily intended as response advertising) is where we are going to see massive change. However hard the industry attempts to create increasingly targeted, personalised ads, this is still 1.x media. It is still interuptive. Dave Morgan's piece "Outing Heavy Clickers" sums this up for me. Most web users ignore ads. Audiences are becoming more and more sophisticated web users and either psychologically or physically block out ads - we just don't see them any more. This can only be countered in the 1.x model by being more and more intrusive (eg pop-ups), but it's a pointless battle. It may take time. but for Media1.0 time is up, and this may be the Achilles heal for Google and the ad-tech industry.
So I'm with David that engagement marketing is what it's all about, and Mark Kingdon's piece referenced below is a good read. 1-1 marketing was a Media1.0 myth. We don't make choices as individuals, we make choices through interaction with our peer group, through our communities. Marketers want me to spend quality time with their brand, they want a slice of my attention. But my attention is a scarce and highly valuable asset - if I am to share it with a brand I want engagement that is relevant and of high value to me and my community. That's the Media2.0 challenge.
I was interested by a follow-on comment here which argued from a different perspective the evolution of marketing as we know it today from the start of the industrial age. He cites Marx's thesis that early 19th century mass production disconnected the consumer from production and in doing so destroyed the social relationship between consumer and product.
'Marketing' was the ersatz replacement for that once real relationship. Engagement marketing is the recreation of it via digital technology.I think this is a very powerful concept which has got me thinking. I recently came across an post in Advertising Age which touches on the same issue. Patricia Martin argues that the convergence of art, technology, business and education is empowering the "cultured consumer". Indeed it is this phenomena that is driving UGC.
But statistics and empirical evidence of pro-sumer publishing show a very different picture. Marketing1.0 was about the segmenting and dividing of people and products. But ..For years, marketers viewed the cultural consumer as an elite market segment, estimated to represent 2% of the overall population.
The old rules of marketing by age, sex, income and similar attributes no longer work. The legion of cultural consumers is a behavioral cohort that forms around experiences and genres
These new behaviours and the rise of vastly better informed and self-assured consumers changes the face of marketing as it changes the face of publishing. The consumer in the post industrial age is informed, connected, has his own opinions, reflects and influences his own community, and can/will respond to new information stimuli. This is not the uninformed, easily pigeon-holed, easily influenced consumer of the post-war era.
Demographic segmentation as a core marketing tool is in its twilight.
But Patricia Martin and the commentators on FasterFuture believe that the future of marketing, of bringing consumers closer to production, will signal the end of a century long era of marketing created by the industrial era. I don't believe it.
Increasingly sophisticated consumers, as well as being able to see through and reject the crass representation of 1.0 advertising, are also increasingly demanding and ruthlessly selective of the infotainment they choose to receive - including brand communication. This is mediation as discussed by Thomas de Zengotita in his masterpiece book Mediated.
If consumers demand goods and services which appear more "real", more "homemade", then big brands will respond and create the perception, through representation, of products in this way. Stone washed or pe-torn jeans from Levi are just the beginning.
This is not a phenomena on which we can turn back the clock. Representation is a drug to which all developed society is addicted. It is inexorable and cannot be reversed.
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