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By Steve Sult
As an ad and marketing dude myself, I cringe when I come across Philistine ad goofs prattling on about our recession and the budget-hacking and how we’ll all be saved by online communities and social media.
Egad! it’s making what little hair I have left hurt!
How many times do we drink the Kool-Aid while continuing to buy stuff that most of us should already know (or certainly be able to anticipate) once we’ve had more than five years of marketing experience?
“If you’re in advertising, you’d better learn to speak digital, because that’s the way the world is going,” Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research profoundly proclaims in a recent post. And on what does he base his statement? Why, upon the findings revealed in Forrester’s recently published five-year interactive marketing forecast -available to you now for about $1750.
Bernoff writes, “Unlike the last recession, digital marketing is no longer experimental. Now it looks more like advertising is inefficient, relative to digital. More than half of the marketers we surveyed said that effectiveness of direct mail, TV, magazines, outdoor, newspapers, and radio would stay the same or decrease within three years. In contrast, well over 70 percent expected the effectiveness of channels like created social media, online video, and mobile marketing to increase.”
Correct me if I’m making this up, but isn’t everything digital today? What difference does it make whether you’re creating interactive or Internetive or whatever? Unless my brain has become muddled (which is certainly possible), the whole purpose of great advertising is to sell a proposition and create demand. Period. Did something change here?
If more than half of the marketers said that “effectiveness of direct mail, TV, magazines, outdoor, newspapers and radio would stay the same or decrease,” and over 70 percent expect the effectiveness of created social media, online video, and mobile marketing to increase then, depending on your specific product (or, yes, service), the right combination of traditional media and a strong online presence holds the key to a successful product launch, corporate awareness program, et. al. This makes perfect sense to me.
At another point in his article, the bullish Bernoff states, “The result is that digital, which will be about 12 percent of overall advertising spend in 2009, is likely to grow to about 21 percent in five years. Along the way, overall advertising budgets won’t grow much.”
I disagree. Of course, budgets won’t grow for awhile. Clients everywhere had the shit scared out of them in 2008. But to say overall ad budgets “won’t grow much” -from where is Mr. Bernoff pulling his numbers, anyway?
Go ahead. Read Bernoff’s article. Even check out the interactive marketing forecast. But if you’re interested in saving and/or making money -and aren’t we all? -I strongly suggest you refrain from seeing which of your credit cards will carry this fount of information for you. It will cost you close to a couple thousand dollars ($1,749 to be exact) to buy a 22 page downloadable booklet that is more than likely filled with generally negative predictions, vague projections and some more of that good old marketing mumbo-jumbo.
Doc Yankee said it best when he told me, “Shoo, Steverino! We give this stuff away all the time for free.” He’s right. A lot of advertisers are nervous wrecks these days, and are fair game for anyone who rolls through, touting expertise -which unfortunately includes a fair number of supposed SEO experts and flashy marketing gurus selling their various brands of pots and pans.
Here in Mojo Land, our mission is to avoid looking or acting anything like carpetbaggers. We do this by offering plain talk, solid strategy and, of course, a lot of Creative Mojo. Development of a culture (whether online or traditional or, more aptly these days, both) is based on more than expectations on your ROI.
A guy with whom I’d like to have a beer, Seth Godin said, “You’re all trying to put a meatball on a sundae.”
I agree.
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Steve Sult is part of the Marketing Mojo team.
Did you hear the one about the recent blog wherein a couple reported its fabulous encounters with Wal-Mart employees during a cross-country trip? It was underwritten by a group funded by Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
