Go for an arresting Claim

Remember the Wizard of Oz? When the great curtains of the Emerald City

were finally pulled back, Dorothy and her friends found...nothing. Just a small

anxious figure who had until then been able to project a big confident illusion.

Well, advertising people have been hiding a dreadful secret, they have nothing

to hide, nothing to propose, and, worse still, nothing to support their

bombastic illusions! Listen to an ad man speak and you would not gain the

impression of a master strategist, towering intellect, communications colossus

and business titan whom we underestimate at our peril. Advertising

agencies have, for years, been past masters of making an arresting claim

whenever they are hazy about facts or logic, which happens to be most of the

time! The world, the media and our own country have for too long indulged

advertising by never responding to their abstractions that advertising works and

that has suited advertising beautifully. Now as more and more evidence of the

failure of advertising emerges one is forced to admit that advertising is a

total business disaster and has been so for many a year!

There is a niggling, small-scale dishonesty in the way they use words facts and

figures. There is, in advertising people, a paralyzing failure of intellectual

confidence together with a yawning absence of true creativity. Take for

example the intellectual nonsense of accountant turned ad man, Sir Martin

Sorrell. He recently said London and New York are

no longer the creative centers of the world. Absolute stuff and nonsense, if

he, accountant turned ad man Sorrell knew anything about the process of

communication he would appreciate the fact that creativity is no longer, if it

ever has been, the sole criterion for the success or otherwise of an advertising

campaign!He goes on to talk about the most financially efficient advertising

again, complete stuff and nonsense there is no such thing as accountability in

advertising so nobody knows a dam thing about financially efficient

advertising. See what I mean about niggling small-scale dishonesty in the

way they use words?

People Respect Bankers And Politicians More Than Marketers !


According to a study by Adobe and Edelman Berland, people think

both politicians and bankers are more respectable than marketers. Only 13 percent of

consumers think that marketing benefits society. In fact, only 35 percent of respondents who

work in marketing think that their profession is valuable.

But when asked if marketing benefits society, only 13% of consumers agreed.

And compared to other professions, the results were grim. Teachers -- despite

how little they are often compensated -- were valued at the top of the list,

followed by scientists and engineers. That's somewhat to be expected. But what

was more surprising was that advertising and marketing ranked below nearly every

other profession, including bankers (32%), lawyers (34%) and even politicians

(18%). Marketing and advertising was tied with the job of an actor or actress in

terms of its value.

There was only one profession that ranked lower in the survey, and even that

one is just a part of the marketing ecosystem: PR professionals. Only 11% said

PR is a valuable job. Meanwhile, the results weren't much better among

marketers; only 35% of people who were marketers themselves deemed it a valuable

profession in responding to the survey!

Social Media's Massive Failure

For several years there has been consensus among a very vocal and highly placed group of marketing executives and commentators that fundamental changes have taken place in our culture and in technology which render traditional modes of marketing communication no longer relevant or effective.

The thinking behind the hypothesis goes like this:
Marketing is a "conversation."
People are no longer willing to accept the "interruption" model of advertising.
The objective of marketing communication is for a brand to create "engagement" with consumers.
Traditional forms of advertising do not create engagement and have substantially outlived their usefulness.
The Internet has created an environment in which consumer control of his/her purchasing behavior is unprecedented.
Consumers are quickly moving away from brands that are obviously out to sell them something in favor of brands that seek to engage with them and have conversations.
Social media represents the most effective medium for engaging with consumers and having these conversations.
Among mainstream brands that have adopted this new marketing paradigm, none has been more zealous than Pepsi-Cola.

Last year, Pepsi substantially abandoned its long-standing commitment to traditional advertising in favor of social media. It canceled its annual Super Bowl advertising. It diverted tens of millions of dollars from traditional advertising to create the "Pepsi Refresh Project." Pepsi Refresh was an online social media initiative in which Pepsi gave out 20 million dollars. They also spent many millions more in support of this initiative.

I am pretty certain Refresh is the largest social media initiative ever undertaken. Never before, to my knowledge, has a brand taken so much of its traditional advertising money and energy and re-directed it into social media.

Most major brands have some kind of social media program. But never before, to my knowledge, has a major consumer brand made a social media program the centerpiece of its advertising and marketing.
"We took the divergent path," explained Frank Cooper, chief consumer engagement officer for Pepsi. "We wanted to explore how a brand could be integrated into the digital space."
The idea behind the program was that you, the consumer, got to engage with Pepsi by voting for the "Refresh" projects you deemed most worthy. There were also other opportunities to engage through an enormous online effort -- Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, website, blogs. Millions of dollars were also spent in what might be called "traditional advertising in support of social media."

Skeptics (such as yours truly) have been eagerly awaiting a report card on this initiative as it is the first real test case for a major brand implementing a massive transfer of marketing resources from traditional advertising to social media.

The results are now in. It has been a disaster.
Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Pepsi-Cola and Diet Pepsi had each lost about 5% of their market share in the past year.
If my calculations are correct, for the Pepsi-Cola brand alone this represents a loss of over $350 million. For both brands, the loss is probably something in the neighborhood of 400 million to half-a-billion dollars.
For the first time ever Pepsi-Cola has dropped from its traditional position as the number two soft drink in America to number three (behind Diet Coke.)
In 2010, Pepsi's market share erosion accelerated by 8 times compared to the previous year.
The Refresh Project accomplished everything a social media program is expected to: Over 80 million votes were registered; almost 3.5 million "likes" on the Pepsi Facebook page; almost 60,000 Twitter followers. The only thing it failed to do was sell Pepsi.

It achieved all the false goals and failed to achieve the only legitimate one.

In reaction to this disaster, Massimo d'Amore, chief executive of PepsiCo Beverages Americas had this to say...
"When my ancestors went from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, they blew up the place, so that's what we are doing."
He also said...
"We need television to make the big, bold statement...
Social media has taken a huge hit. Only zealots and fools will continue to bow down to the gods of social media.

Guess who said this? "The advertising business is going down the drain...

                   ...It's being pulled down by the people who create it, who don't know how to sell anything, who have never sold anything in their lives , who despise selling, whose mission in life is to be clever show-offs and con clients into giving them money to display originality and genius."
Believe it or not, that quote comes from advertising icon David Ogilvy. And
that was before the World Wide Web was invented.
But remember, he wasn't talking about Interactive Communication!

The financial crisis has transformed the global marketing world...

The financial crisis has transformed the global marketing world...

and, at the same time, discredited many of the ideas regarding advertising, marketing, consumers and society, that were taken for granted in the pre-crisis decades. Here nobody appears to see the crisis as an opportunity to build a new form of capitalism. Nobody seems to see that the future can be – and most certainly should be – better than the past.

Without a doubt the institutions discredited by the crisis can be replaced with something better, not merely patched up and restored. Corporations see the crisis entirely as a threat to established ways of life and modes of thinking. Nobody is presenting a vision, or even a credible thought, about how the crisis could produce a better tomorrow. The best that has been offered is a promise to clear up the mess created by previous corporations

. Without a doubt the new forms of advertising and marketing that must emerge from the crisis must be very different from the systems that were so badly damaged in the early 1980. The transformation will not just be a matter of rewriting some rules or replacing some incompetent people. It will mean changing the relationship between markets and consumers that has defined each successive version of marketing.

It is time to engage with citizens' anxieties about the profound problems of pre-crisis marketing and advertising suddenly revealed in 2008, the creation of an over informed society, clutter, lack of accountability, the Internet, Social Media and so on. Like all those packaged-up bundles of bad debt, contemporary advertising has no fundamental value. It was misplaced faith in future economic growth that drove up the values of 30-second TV commercials!

The Clients spent so much money on advertising because they believed that they were living in the best of times and that it was all just a one way street - upwards! We all now know all this wasn't true. In the years to come this advertising will be seen as the ultimate symbol of the economic fairyland we have been living through in the past fifteen years or so, an era in which the world lost touch with its sense of value. These were not masterpieces of advertising, they were the icons of idiocy.

By thinking seriously about such fundamental reforms, business leaders can engage with their customers' anxieties about the profound problems of pre-crisis marketing. The crisis has blown away the simplistic belief that the markets automatically produces the best possible outcomes and that we must always accept whatever social consequences market forces dictate.

Having invested over $10 million in independent research, Paul Ashby is ideally suited to present the case for the widespread use of interactive marketing communication. The research investment has proved conclusively that one exposure to an interactive "event" is far more effective in all key measurements, than traditional advertising. Paul made this investment because his company, Effective . Accountable . Communication is predicated on being totally accountable to its Clients. Discover more on http://interactivetelevisionorinteractivetv.blogspot.com or http://effectiveaccountablecommunication.blogspot.com You can contact Paul on: paulashby40@yahoo.com

THE NEXT BIG THING...

...FLOGS

　

Be careful what you believe on the internet: there’s a growing chance that you re being hoaxed by a cynical PR firm. Just as the blogging explosion was teaching us about "vlogs" (video bloggs) and "moblogs" (mobile blogs), along comes yet another trend that is far more pernicious.

A "flog" is a fake weblog that purports to chronicle an ordinary consumer’s passion for a business or a product, typcally without the company behind it declaring an interest. It is a scandalously dishonest practice.

Take Laura and Jim, an ordinary couple who recently drove a camper van across America and stopped over for free each night at their nearest Wal-Mart car park. Their likeably amateurish travel journal, Wal-Marting across America, chronicled all the decent, hard working Wal-Mart employees they encountered during their stopovers, all of whom seemed to have been stories about the company.

Lo and behold, the couple turned out to be a professional paid by Wal-Mart’s PR firm, Edelman, and folksy Jim was revealed to be a professional Washington Post photographer. Last month, Laura used the blog to come clean, admitting that she "should have done a better job" telling her story.

Since then, Edelman’s fingerprints have been found all over other related flogs. Working Families For Wal-Mart claims to be a grassroots advocacy group focusing on "the positive contribution of Wal-Mart to working families"; the PaidCritics.com blog sets out to "expose" union employees paid to "smear" the retail chain. Typical postings attack activists for denying "working families" cheap Wal-Mart prescriptions of half-price baby food.

Use Interactive Marketing Communication and know exactly what your getting!

Who's running your Organization?

Your customers, that’s who!

　

Or should be!

　

So don’t you think that you ought to start a regular dialogue with him or

her, as the case may be?

　

The word empowerment is a very overused word. However in the near future the primary strategic marketing communications battle will be to see who goes furthest in empowering their customers.

To empower your customers you will have to:
1. Provide them with far more information than you currently do.
2. Allow them to make decisions about you and your company together with your resources.
3. Give them plenty of choice.
4. Give them the perception of control!
5. Allow them to feel that they are running your organisation!

Because anything that tightens your relationships with an existing customer increases the revenue you get from your customer.

And the only form of communication that can do all the above so that you do tighten your grip on your customer is….interactive communication!

Because interactive communication allows you to have an ongoing debate with your customers and your prospects, make regular interactive conversations available where they can debate not only about your products and services but the very soul of your company. Because that will be much more powerful than just putting your advertisement on television (or wherever) or I’m going to sell my goods in Tesco (or wherever).

Then, when you get asked, "Who’s running your business?" you can honestly reply, "My customers through genuine interactive programmes!" and earn major brownie points!

What's your definition of chutzpah? Because mine is the headline "Sorrell Gives Grade Two Years"!

Yes that's right folks, chutzpah up to here…why?

Hmmm…well there are so many reasons that I don't know quite know where to start!

However one constant quickly emerges from all the news issuing forth, and that is the complete inability of these two to escape from the dreadful Top-Down-Management inability to see the need for utter transparency.

The Advertising Industry and The T.V. Industry are seemingly rushing to sort out each other's problems, however they never stop to consider their logical (and most important) customer…the viewer!


INTERACTIVE MARKETING COMMUNICATION COULD SOLVE ALL THESE PROBLEMS RIGHT NOW!
Please take the time to visit:http://interactivetelevisionorinteractivetv.blogspot.com