Interaction and The Outdated Idea of Mass Marketing

Advertising together with Broadcast Media, finally bite the dust!

Because no longer is the Marketing message, "We want your money". To day the Marketing message has to be "We want your opinions".

Because the moment you put that into real practice you can have everything you've always wanted, sales, customer relationships and also Brand loyalty.

However replacing research with interaction changes all the opportunities to successful marketing. "Yes", you can say," "Interactive Events will create my new products"

However at the moment Big Business is not making the correct decisions regarding interaction. Maybe some people within these organisations know and understand what's happening out there in consumer land. But the dreadful fact is that giving their voice to such statements would, more probably, seriously damage their career growth!

These days I search everywhere for the headline "Interactive Communication is a winning combination for all…The Client…The Media…and last but by no means least…your customer"!

It never appears.

Interactive Communication finally allows the revolution to commence. The revolution against one-size fits all advertising; the bland all-knowing corporate voice, the lack lustre politicians busily furnishing their own nests…from our money.

The fact of the matter is your customers, you, me and everybody else, do not trust business. We find it highly insulting to be treated this way and we mistrust you in numbers far greater than you or your advertising/marketing people allow for.

Dialogue, two-way conversations, would start to change these hostile attitudes. You really do need to commence interactive events - right now. And you can do so in existing media.

Before I go on, I must emphasise that on no account let your Advertising Agency tempt you into spending big bucks on the Web. Already the Advertising-as-Usual crowd is pouring billions into the Web, however be warned, as they said in the "Cluetrain Manifesto", "So you advertise on the Internet…so what"? If you think you are wasting money on Advertising-as-Usual be very careful. The Internet, possibly is a bigger waste of money than Advertising-as-Usual, and, as we all know, right now that is one Mother of a huge waste of money!

"Why?" you may ask "has it all changed from the safe secure way of marketing in the past".

Simply put, Advertising-as-Usual, together with its handmaiden Broadcasting-as-Usual have treated us with too much contempt. According to a recent article in the Times, TV executives commonly think of viewers' phone revenue as "moron tax". And this attitude of utter contempt pervades the executives of advertising and Broadcast-as-Usual, and expresses itself in all the offerings of a rip-off culture, from government to TV companies.

And bear in mind that Advertising-as-Usual and Broadcast-as-Usual hold Clients in great contempt as well. They rejoice in removing large chunks of your Marketing Budgets, to then waste them in rip-off ventures that only worsen the publics' contempt for you…so in effect they are spending your money to get you into a ever worsening situation.

I have been criticized by some as being a one-trick pony

- that I constantly espouse Interactive Marketing Communication and that's it. Plus I have been called "a Cassandra" and a "scold" Meanwhile, what I am trying to do is predict a far larger change in advertising and marketing entirely.

My forecasts are not meant to paint a rosy picture and that leads to many of you giving me less credibilty. For obvious reasons you would prefer to listen to a more bullish outlook. After all "nobody likes a bear, especially when they are right"!

The old ways of marketing and advertising are becoming increasingly ineffective and, even dangerous.

Conventional wisdom has become out-of-date and inaccurate! Despite all the recognition that my writing as acquired our basic message is still falling mostly on deaf ears, or, perhaps "denying minds". Most people do not want to wake up and fully face the truth of what is really happening. Marketing is evolving. We are not going back to how it was before. We are going forward to something new.

I understand how wishful thinking is so tempting. People hope that the bad dream is over and all is on the upswing. That outlook is not realistic in the long term.

The key to correctly judging` the future of marketing is to recognise that the future will be significantly different from the past. Rather than face decline or even the demise of advertising and marketing people still want to believe in the mythical "advertising works" to bring us back to what they had before!

　

What happens in real life is what matters to or between customers

.

Marketers should focus on creating social meaning and social utility-things that help real

world social interaction or support the group's interests-rather than forcing

meaning on individuals through brain washing or bribery. Products or services

could be devised to be interesting enough to become talked about in the first

place. The first change in the way we think about media, must be a major

shift away from thinking about media as channels' down which we tip messages

and information. Only in so far as they serve and help advertisers access and

harness the power of the social networks that lie behind them.

Incidentally, an interesting piece of research has just emerged which confirms

what I have long suspected, whilst, at the same time, going along with my

suspicion about the creative ego and the use of very high priced Hollywood

directors! Advertisements starring high profile celebrities such as David

Beckham and Jamie Oliver do not sell products as well as those featuring every

day people, new research suggested. A study by the University of Bath and

the University of St Gallen in Switzerland, found that ordinary members of the

public are more effective in selling products than super stars paid millions to

endorse them. That's because people are more worried about keeping up with the

Jones's than the rich and famous! Never-the-less we guarantee that those

Advertising Agencies will keep on using highly paid Hollywood movie directors as

well as using the rich and famous as models, there goes millions more of the poor

old clients budget again;again;again! All I will say is this, use

Interactive Programs, properly executed, and you will not have to spend money on

Hollywood Directors or, for that matter, the likes of David Beckham etc.

So the next time your Advertising Agency comes with their invoice, go through it

with a fine toothcomb and delete the name(s) David Beckham, or whomever. Then

check out who the director is, if he's Hollywood, strike him out as well; we

guarantee that you'll be surprised at how much you can save. Then half

your budget and start using Interactive Marketing

programs, again, you'll be surprised at the positive results at a fraction

of your normal advertising costs!With Interactive Marketing

you don't have expensive, unnecessary add-ons! With Interactive Marketing

Communication you don't have wasteful coupons! With Interactive Marketing

Communication you don't have wasteful promotional activity! With Interactive

Marketing Communication you don't have David Beckhams! With Interactive

Marketing Communication you don't have expensive Hollywood movie Directors!

With Interactive Marketing Communications you do have sales and increased

profits! - plus a whole lot more.

Your complete and utter lack of understanding of the word "communication"

together with a lack of appreciation as to what can, and does, stifle effective communication.

All advertising is a form of learning whereby the advertiser is asking people to change their behavior after learning the benefits of the products or services on offer. However, we all tend to filter out information, which we do not want to hear. This clearly alters the effectiveness of conventional advertising in quite a dramatic way.

The final purchase decision is invariably a compromise and this leads to a certain amount of anxiety; the worry that perhaps the decision was not the best or the right one. In order to minimise this anxiety the purchaser seeks to reinforce their choice and begins to take more notice of their chosen product's marketing communications.

Due to a lack of understanding of the communication process we have created a media society during the past 40 or 50 years, where the whole process has been de-humanized.

There is now an extraordinary reduction in interaction because conventional advertising and marketing have become a one-way practice whereby information is disseminated in a passive form.

So what are you going to do about this?

　

The No 1 task for Business: Reinvent Marketing & Advertising.

Hopefully lessons will been learnt from the crisis, do not try to rebuild business on the principle that Marketing & Advertising are always right!

The words "60% of all advertising, globally is wasted" were splashed recently across the marketing papers. This kind of unanimity in the trade press is not coincidental — "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" the advertising community do-nothing mentality was taken to its logical extreme by the preparation of $3 million ads for the Super Bowl by advertising agencies apparantly totally unaware that they are all well past their sell by date.

To have any hope of repairing the damage left behind by the highly dishonest and incompetent banks, big business must first convince the majority of the population that they are really capable of fixing the problems.. Not only are we trapped in the worst recession in living memory. but behind all this lurks a horror even more shocking; the entire marketing/advertising-economic model of free enterprise, rugged individualism, creative advertising and marketing is broken beyond all hope of repair.
Marketing/Advertising on which the Western world built its seeming success seems to have completly broken down. How else can one describe a situation in which all of the country's main financial institutions and many of its biggest industrial companies are effectively bankrupt and on government life-support?

Well TAG is the way forward because it makes your customer the very centre of your business

Professor Eric Clemons said What?


Pushing a message at a potential customer when it has not been requested and when the consumer is in the midst of something else on the net, will fail as a major revenue source for most internet sites. This is particularly true when the consumer knows that the sponsor of the ad has paid to have this information, which was verified by no one, thrust at him. The net will find monetization models and these will be different from the advertising models used by mass media, just as the models used by mass media were different from the monetization models of theater and sporting events before them. Indeed, there has to be some way to create websites that do other than provide free access to content, some of it proprietary, some of it licensed, and some of it stolen, and funded by advertising.

Hey we have already been there – done that – and we have over $10m of independent research which proves how much more accountable Interactive Marketing Communication is...want to see some research? Then Call Paul Ashby on 01934 620047 or email: paulashby40@yahoo.com

Advertising Agencies have treated consumers as a Ponzi scheme.



Success in marketing and advertising has been bought by promises with costs far in excess

of reality. We have hoped for a tomorrow in which record sales growth will yield

record levels of marketing expenditures to cover the promises when they come due

The problem?....tomorrow never comes!! Our legacy to our successors should

not be temporary austerity but a permant, massive reform of Marketing and

Advertising. We have to be unflinching and utterly practical in recognising the

scale of the challange.

Should you use the internet?...definately not!

Jerry Della Femina claims that most online advertising creates resentment, working to shut down attention rather than elicit interest. Zergio Zyman feels that banner ads are a joke, and Della Femina goes on to say "…and figure out different ways to reach people but we're not going to reach them by advertising on the internet".

But you can reach them very effectively by using Interactive Marketing Communication using existing media - right now!