Sunday, March 21, 2004

'All marketing should be permission marketing'... 'All marketing should be permission marketing' : Ten years ago, Procter & Gamble CEO Ed Artzt gave a now-legendary speech shaming the ad industry into innovating and embracing new media. I was starting online then and it made waves. Now, 10 years later, another P&G exec, Jim Stengel, gives a followup speech to the industry and gives them a bad grade, a C-, for their efforts so far. A few good lines: In 1994, we anticipated an explosion in TV channels, resulting in significant fragmentation in viewers. Today, the average U.S. household has more than 90 TV channels—this is up from an average of 27 channels in 1994. Share for the big four networks during primetime has dropped from 52.4 percent to 30.6 percent. Specialized networks offer advertisers access to more segmented audiences, but in much smaller volume. And we’ve lost whole segments of consumers whose needs aren’t being met by today’s programming. We must accept the fact that there is no “mass” in “mass media” anymore, and leverage more targeted approaches. And I especially like this: All marketing should be permission marketing. All marketing should be so appealing that consumers want us in their lives. We should strive to be invited into consumers’ lives and homes. When we think of permission-based marketing, most of us think about opt-in online newsletters. We really need to expand this mentality to all aspects of marketing. We must develop creative that both maximizes the channel and appeals to the consumer. For each element of the marketing mix, we should ask ourselves “would consumers choose to look at or listen to this,” and let that be the benchmark. I like that: All marketing should be permission marketing. Right. Yet I think he's still not looking at that from quite the right perspective. Almost, but not quite. He's still thinking about all this in terms of old-time creative and old-time media: Is our commercial good enough to show you? Instead, they should be thinking: Is our information good enough to serve you? And he can even start to think about having mutual friends (see Chris Locke's Gonzo Marketing on the idea of underwriting citizens' media). For this new medium offers more than eyeballs. It offers relationships. And, more important, it offers the consumer control. So rather than trying to create a commercial you force upon a consumer that so darned good he might tolerate if given a choice, realize instead that consumers do now go to advertising when it's useful: I go to Handspring's site to learn about and buy their phone. More important, I go to fellow consumers -- with whom I have a relatsionship of trust -- to learn about products. I went to the TreoCentral forums to learn more about Handspring's phone before and after I bought it. That's a helluva different from happening to see a good commercial about the phone. That's the future of marketing. As Fred Wilson said one morning, "The push model of advertising is over. It's over. It's just a matter of time before people realize it. It's toast." [BuzzMachine] 12:58:26 AM    trackback []