The desperate need to restructure advertising and marketing

Jan 22
08:35

2011

Paul Ashby

Paul Ashby

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Only interactive marketing communication will provide clients with the necessary communicaion and feedback necessary for effective marketing to take place.

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For too long,  The desperate need to restructure advertising and marketing Articles marketing functions have been vertically organised by media type. This approach is mirrored on the agency side, with rewards based on discipline-specific P&L models. These must be torn down.

On the client-side Marketing and Brand Managers must involve and lead a team of colleagues who have the responsibility, vision, understanding and commitment to engage in a media-agnostic planning process. And this team of enlightened marketers must be willing to let strategic goals -- not historic patterns -- drive budget allocations.

Achieving strategic integration requires a top-to-bottom reinvention of the marketing organisation. Holistic professionals who are system thinkers, customer-centric believers, innovators and dreamers must lead this transformation.

These individuals should be cross-trained to understand the entire marketing spectrum and learn discipline-specific skill sets. And to specifically understand the real meaning of the word "communication" Increasingly, these leaders will need strong quantitative skills -- in order to analyse the data-rich resources and leverage mathematical tools now available, especially if they are to drive cross-disciplinary approaches that fuse disparate consumer-engagement channels. Above all, they need to be superior team leaders who have the insights, talent and passion to take marketing integration to new heights.

Engaging in conversations with relevant markets (Interacting) will become an important source of knowledge and innovation, the quality of this market intelligence has already (and will do so more in the future) proven to be more accurate than research and will determine market share.

Without interactive communication your efforts to create new products and markets will be taking place in a vacuum.

As your products come to reflect the information provided by the genuine conversations of interactive communication, instead of the ballyhoo and adversarial marketing tactics that poses as marketing today, companies will be far better served, and so will their customers.

Oddly enough with Interactive Communication companies can have everything they've always wanted. Greater market share, customer loyalty etc. etc. All the empty promises that advertising has been promising their clients but failed to deliver!

To day, big business, with their handmaidens, advertising & marketing have created mass media.

And the biggest mass medium is broadcast. And that is command and control management, complementing big business thoroughly. Both are all about imposing control top-down and both are driven by ratings, research and cost per thousand.

Sad for them people are turning away from 'broadcast' in their millions because of a number of reasons, they have acquired other interests and concerns which broadcast cannot provide. Plus the fact that people are heartily sick of the sterile pronouncements of corporations and broadcast media. And especially of advertisements!

I close by making the observertation that we live in surreal times when we are asked “online Marketing Vs Traditional Marketing which is more effective”?

Well neither of them are even proven as effective. Eric Clemons, Professir of Operations & Information Management @ The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, argues that the Internet shatters all forms of advertising. “The problem is not the medium, the problem is the message and the fact that it is not trusted, not wanted and not needed.

There are three problems with advertising in any form, whether broadcast on online. 1) Consumers do not trust advertising,2) Consumers do not want to view advertising and most important, 3) Consumers do not need advertising!

It is all there in my book “Television Killed Advertising” (@ Amazon Books UK) where we went wrong in the past and where we are going wrong now.  More information? pl.ashby@gmail.com

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