Question
What are the hot topics in marketing and branding at the moment?
Answer
Let me start with a little skit you can put on at your next all-hands meeting:
Ad guy: "As John Wanamaker said, I know half of my advertising works; I
just don't know which half, ha ha!"
Google guy: "I do. It's this half. Fire the other guy."
Ad guy: "But he mixes a mean Old Fashioned! Clients love and trust him! You must have made a mistake! He's our Don Draper!"
Google guy: Trust me, it's this other guy you want to keep.
Ad guy: You're crazy. He's won no awards, he thinks like a bean counter and both accounts and creative hate him. We don't even let him in the same room with clients anymore. He keeps saying things that make them panic.
With that prelude, here's my my list...which I call (drum roll!):
The Marketing/Branding Pandora Box:
In general, I find that professional marketers are running scared, but with a brave face. The only thing keeping them going is that their customers are even more clueless and scared, which has bought them some time. So long as they can keep their clients insecurities about brand consistency and other traditional concerns on Red Alert, they'll still have a job.
The business model of the marketing industry is to keep their customers at least 10% more panicked than they themselves are. So long as they keep doing the same things, throw up a useless Facebook page, and impress their ignorant clients with a bullshit analysis of the Old Spice "I am on a horse" video, they can keep the account and the false sense of security.
The ONLY genuine spark of intellectual revitalization of the core profession is a new curiosity about narrative and intent. About 99/100 of the people who throw those terms around have no idea what they mean (marketers have a preternatural ability to arrest their own thinking about X once they find a word for it). But the remaining 1% just might achieve something.
But in general, this is too little, too late. It's basically game over for traditional marketing/branding. A new breed of small, peripheral players, who blend PR, marketing and sales in smart ways is emerging, waiting to move in once the empire at the center collapses. Anybody with any talent is fleeing to this periphery to avoid getting caught in the collapse.
Tee hee. I love the smell of napalm in the morning.
Ad guy: "As John Wanamaker said, I know half of my advertising works; I
just don't know which half, ha ha!"
Google guy: "I do. It's this half. Fire the other guy."
Ad guy: "But he mixes a mean Old Fashioned! Clients love and trust him! You must have made a mistake! He's our Don Draper!"
Google guy: Trust me, it's this other guy you want to keep.
Ad guy: You're crazy. He's won no awards, he thinks like a bean counter and both accounts and creative hate him. We don't even let him in the same room with clients anymore. He keeps saying things that make them panic.
With that prelude, here's my my list...which I call (drum roll!):
The Marketing/Branding Pandora Box:
- Panic about the industry's future in the wake of the decline of traditional mass media
- Worry and envy about the rising threat from PR as the new king of the selling black arts
- Extreme FUD over social technology as threat (84.8%) and lip service to it as opportunity (13.2%)
- Deep insecurity over lack of skills in the emerging quant/analytics game, and fear that the happy era of being unable to measure effectiveness is over.
- The Hope Butterfly: Narrative and Intent
In general, I find that professional marketers are running scared, but with a brave face. The only thing keeping them going is that their customers are even more clueless and scared, which has bought them some time. So long as they can keep their clients insecurities about brand consistency and other traditional concerns on Red Alert, they'll still have a job.
The business model of the marketing industry is to keep their customers at least 10% more panicked than they themselves are. So long as they keep doing the same things, throw up a useless Facebook page, and impress their ignorant clients with a bullshit analysis of the Old Spice "I am on a horse" video, they can keep the account and the false sense of security.
The ONLY genuine spark of intellectual revitalization of the core profession is a new curiosity about narrative and intent. About 99/100 of the people who throw those terms around have no idea what they mean (marketers have a preternatural ability to arrest their own thinking about X once they find a word for it). But the remaining 1% just might achieve something.
But in general, this is too little, too late. It's basically game over for traditional marketing/branding. A new breed of small, peripheral players, who blend PR, marketing and sales in smart ways is emerging, waiting to move in once the empire at the center collapses. Anybody with any talent is fleeing to this periphery to avoid getting caught in the collapse.
Tee hee. I love the smell of napalm in the morning.