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For a long time now, the utopia for online dis­play adver­tis­ing has been to be as tar­geted and as cost-effective as search adver­tis­ing in order to claw back adver­tis­ing dol­lars. The jour­ney has been slow, ad net­works ini­tially helped scale online dis­play adver­tis­ing and pro­vided lay­ers of tar­get­ing tech­nolo­gies to make the cam­paigns more effec­tive. How­ever, pric­ing was based on arti­fi­cial flat fees and seg­ments that had been pre-set within the lim­its of indi­vid­ual ad net­works.

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It’s amaz­ing how often I hear some­thing to the effect of “No one reads copy these days.” Now, of course, being a pro­fes­sional B2B copy­writer by trade, you might expect me to have a hang up about copy. I also encounter the related belief that we are all writ­ers. I write. You write. It’s stuff we all learnt at school. How hard can it be?

Today, it’s all about the pictures

We are a more visual cul­ture than ever before. Each of us spends seri­ous qual­ity time in front of one screen or another every sin­gle day. Over the years, adver­tis­ing has become more visual and less wordy. Online video is still grow­ing expo­nen­tially. And mil­lions of peo­ple restrict their thoughts to bursts of 140 char­ac­ters or less.

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Per­sonas – the fic­tional char­ac­ters cre­ated to help bring tar­get cus­tomers to life – are now pretty much ubiq­ui­tous in mar­ket­ing depart­ments and their agen­cies. They are used to more accu­rately depict var­i­ous cus­tomer seg­ments, giv­ing a firmer foun­da­tion on which to address customers.

You can see why. Where at one time our tar­get might be described as:

• IT direc­tor in an enterprise-sized business
• Located in EMEA with mul­ti­ple offices
• Cur­rently using tra­di­tional tele­phony across all sites
• Their cur­rent con­tract is due to expire in the next 12 months
• Etc

Now we have:

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“The cus­tomer is in charge. If you think you own your brand, you’re wrong – the cus­tomer does. In fact, for­get brand­ing. No one buys that stuff anymore.”

Sound famil­iar?

Cer­tainly, if you read many of today’s mar­ket­ing blogs, you’ll be left with the impres­sion that these days there’s vir­tu­ally noth­ing you can do to cre­ate, improve or sus­tain a com­pelling brand. The growth of social media and other peer-to-peer com­mu­ni­ca­tions has meant that cus­tomers don’t need to lis­ten to com­pa­nies to get their infor­ma­tion any more. They are more than happy to form their own opin­ions thank you very much. As the Clue­train Man­i­festo says:

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I was speak­ing at a B2B mar­ket­ing event the other day about mobile. For many of us it’s a very hot topic. What amazed me at the event, how­ever, was how few peo­ple in the room are actively con­sid­er­ing mobile mar­ket­ing for their organ­i­sa­tions. And, more impor­tantly, how mobile could form an inte­gral part of their cus­tomer engage­ment strat­egy. For me the biggest prob­lem seems to be a per­cep­tion gap between what mar­keters think and the actual mobile usage amongst their B2B tar­get audi­ences.

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We held another suc­cess­ful Hud­dle over at the Ban­ner offices yes­ter­day. The sub­ject was all things mobile. And, over the course of the next few blog posts, I’ll be tak­ing you through some of the insights from the var­i­ous speak­ers who gen­er­ously gave their time to make the after­noon such a suc­cess:

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• Simon Sil­vester – EVP Head of Plan­ning, Y&R EMEA
• Christina Carstensen – Direc­tor of Mobile Strat­egy, IDG
• Matt Findel-Hawkins – Sales Direc­tor, Nikkei BP Europe
• Mark Challi­nor – Direc­tor of Mobile, Tele­graph Media Group

So here’s me think­ing that pub­lish­ers have really missed an oppor­tu­nity when it comes to pro­vid­ing guar­an­teed leads from their web properties.

Admit­tedly, whitepa­per pro­grammes work well when you’re try­ing to gen­er­ate a list of names. But, some­times that’s all they are – a list of names who are often unre­cep­tive when followed-up by tele­mar­ket­ing. Surely all of these “names” are active on the publisher’s web­site – they’ve been vis­it­ing, review­ing con­tent, con­tribut­ing in forums, etc. But all of this infor­ma­tion isn’t cap­tured when they fill-in a form and the data is passed on to the client.

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B1.com QR Code

There is a head­long stam­pede at moment for pub­lish­ers to do an app. All we hear is ‘must do an app’, ‘can we show you our app?’ Even my daugh­ter says she wants an app!

But whilst this appears to be a symp­tom of an all-consuming desire to go ‘dig­i­tal’, in most sec­tors print still has a major part to play.

There is no way that even a rich-media app can replace the “Tatler” expe­ri­ence, or really be read in the bath (or on the toi­let) with any form of dig­nity.

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I came across this quote from George Lois and it got me think­ing…”Cre­ativ­ity can solve almost any prob­lem. The cre­ative act, the defeat of habit by orig­i­nal­ity, over­comes every­thing.”

I’ve got a nag­ging feel­ing that mar­ket­ing automa­tion is giv­ing today’s mar­keters a num­ber of bad habits. Don’t get me wrong, I’m truly bought into the tan­gi­ble ben­e­fits of auto­mated plat­forms — com­mu­ni­cat­ing at the right time based on expressed and behav­ioural data, iden­ti­fy­ing qual­ity leads and rout­ing them appro­pri­ately to sales. And once the mar­keters have got to grips with the plat­form, they deliver greater effi­cien­cies, speed­ier exe­cu­tion, more con­trol and in-depth mea­sure­ment.

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Look­ing back on my youth, I used to pride myself on my abil­ity to remem­ber all of my friends’ tele­phone num­bers and every uni­ver­sity lec­ture that I had over the course of a week. Now, such feats of mem­ory are no longer required of my brain – my mobile devices and online ser­vices remem­ber and man­age these tasks for me.


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