This morning I went to a marketing breakfast, I know exciting right? Hey, for the record any time you can get free bacon, it’s totally worth whatever else is happening around the bacon. Now normally a marketing event, even one with bacon, wouldn’t be blog worthy. Twitter worthy, yes, but how am I planing on wringing a whole blog post out of it? Especially considering how wordy most of my posts are? Well, it turns out this particular even revealed an important insight (and no, it’ wasn’t that video email, the topic of the event, is awesome.) What I learned this morning was this: In a room of 25 marketing professionals, I was the only one who wasn’t thinking of the internet as a broadcast medium. It’s also important to note (trust me, it’ll be important later) that I was, as far as I could tell, the youngest person in the room full of heads of marketing, marketing managers, brand managers and even a couple CEOs. Even email, something that everyone who works in an office uses a million times a week, was nothing more than a broadcast medium to these people. Now, they had just been told how they could attach their fifteen second spot to that email, but my guess was this was the popular thought even before the video email pitch. The problem is, email is inherently interactive. I can hit reply and talk back, even if I just get a form message as a response, I have options other than “watch this” or “don’t watch this.” This missed opportunity to interact got me thinking. Earlier this week I was introduced multiple times by a friend of mine as an “ad man”. Ok, you’re no doubt thinking, that makes sense, you do advertising. But it didn’t sit right with me. It just didn’t sound right. When I think of an “ad man” I think of Bill Bernbach, Leo Burnett or even Don Draper. All of these men are my heros, but I have a feeling most of them would be hard pressed to be as successful in the internet era. The “ad man”, as he has been classically described, is a dying breed. Focused on telling a great story, capturing and holding an audience’s attention, and getting them to remember a product. All sounds great right? While the guiding principle of “it’s all about the idea” may continue to drive creative departments, thinking about your idea as anything other than a foundation for customer interaction is quickly becoming a waste of time. It’s great to have an idea, but if you try to control the way it looks, feels, smells and tastes everywhere it’s seen, it’s not nearly as effective. Consumers don’t just want to interact with a brand, they demand it. The price of brand loyalty in the age of the internet is a piece of your brand. That’s the cost of entry. The “toll” if you will. You have to give it over to them, and when you do they don’t just buy your brand, they live it. But most companies aren’t thinking about their brands this way. They’re not trying to figure out how to make their internet marketing a foundation their customers can build a personalized brand experience on. Their trying to figure out how to make it more like their print and TV ads from 15 years ago. They want to “capture eyeballs”, measure time spent viewing content. They want a passive audience that simply doesn’t exist on the net (and is increasingly becoming harder to find on TV.) Their more concerned in measuring success in CTRs and CPMs than they are measuring it in comments, facebook fans, response videos or mentions in tweets. This is important to know, because it means our job as advertisers isn’t just to sell our client’s product to the customers (it’s really never been that easy, at least not in the last 25 years from what I’ve heard) but now it’s all about convincing the client that they need to stop trying to control their audience and start playing with them. The “ad man” is passing into history, this is the era of the “customer experience dude.”
