The marketing genius blog entry has generated lots of commentary and I only have time to link to Pete Blackshaw and Bmorrisey thx to Mark Cridge for this. Perhaps I need a separate blog to use a a rough notepad - for now this will have to do.
I heard a speaker from Naked last September using the terminology of own versus paid versus rented media properties and at the time found it really helpful. The point of this is that paying for media should be the last not the first thing we think of doing.
The blog post by the bonafide marketing genius - also references David Armano's blog. And I had a frivolous exchange with Matt Gardan about whether paying for media space was the same as paying for sex and whether those that did so had similar motives.
This is of course yet more bashing of the classic broadcast model on which advertising is based. Which has been loudly announced to be on lifesupport but continues to survive notwithstanding. The new model can't supplant the old one because it really isn't that easy.
1/ Making the numbers. 10 years ago I was trying to model how to use direct mail to replace sales people kicking doors in to sell cable TV and telephone subscriptions. We used the language of push and pull then and it really isn't any different - the numbers don't add up. I still have the spreadsheet. However many times you sent direct mail to people you couldn't match the salesman's first pass which would give you a full 30% response. Our clients wanted to switch to a pull strategy but we couldn't make the numbers add up.
If you want to sleep with the same person for the rest of your life you can afford to take your time. If you want a different lay every day of every week then you have to be a lot more indiscriminate and you have to ask everybody. The numbers businesses are required to do force them to be indiscriminate. And CRM/lifetime value hasn't come to their rescue either for the most part adding cost.
2. But cranking the numbers isn't the biggest problem. Its co-ordination to achieve a commercial objective. The best way I can describe it is the difference between artillery - where you fire a shell at a target. Which is easy to co-ordinate and measure. And throwing frisbees where what matters is uplift, whether the frisbee is caught and whether it is returned. You need many more frisbees, many more throwers and catchers. You don't know beforehand which are going to fly the farthest and get picked up the most. And to date frisbee has not achieved sports status. A lot more people watch football than frisbee throwing. There's a reason for that. Frisbee throwing feels like a knockabout - not a competitive sport. You can have a field of frisbee throwers and its kind of fun but however many people join in does it have a point? Social media channels use content as a pretext for connecting. For the commercial communicator - buying and consuming is the point. So the professional is always going to be at odds with the user.
Losing the faith? I don't see businesses abandoning paid media any time soon. What I perceive is the denigration of commercial communication because it doesn't feel as interesting or involving that that produced by volunteers or enthusiasts. Most worrying is the number of professional communicators (that's us folks) who find the social media channels more interesting. But is this any different to the copywriter who wants to be a full time novelist but had to write ads because it is the only way to pay the bills? To survive we may need a counter reformation - push/paid for media being done not as a poor relation of social media but to its own standards - using the classic strategic skills of condensing and sequencing, with the creative skills of metaphor selection and miniaturisation and the media skills of efficiency regardless of context. Look for the T shirt: Pushy and proud!
