About 2 months ago I wrote a piece called "Social Media's Massive Failure".

It was about the failure of the Pepsi Refresh Project. Most of you disagreed

with my observations that the Refresh effort was a failure. Recently The New

Yorker published an article called "Snacks for a Fat Planet". It isn't specifically

about the Refresh project.

It is about PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi's attempt to transform the

company from the world's largest maker of soda and crappy food into a

company with respectable standards and values. It is actually a very interesting

article and Nooyi comes off as an intelligent, thoughtful but somewhat jargony

leader.The article talks about Refresh as part of Pepsi's desire

to be perceived as a "good" company ...the strategy was to use social media to

promote the image of PepsiCo... to bring the flagship brand more in line with

PepsiCo's "performance with purpose" agenda...Then it goes on to note that

Pepsi's share had dropped 4.8% since the program was introduced.

... the Refresh campaign garnered more than eighty million votes,

got three and a half million likes on Pepsi's Facebook page, and drew some

sixty thousand Twitter followers. But the campaign didn't sell Pepsi.Which to

my ear sounds an awful lot like this paragraph from Social Media's Massive

Failure...

"Over 80 million votes were registered; almost 3.5 million

"likes" on the Pepsi Facebook page; almost 60,000 Twitter followers. The only

thing it failed to do was sell Pepsi." The article concludes...

"It appears that hearing about all the good things that PepsiCo is doing to help

make the world a better place does not tempt you to down a

Pepsi". As we know, there are many in the marketing world who

cannot see the limitations of social media, no matter how compelling the

evidence. Consequently, those of us with open minds and functional synapses

need to remain skeptical and vocal about the "magic" of social media.

"Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to

believe." -- Euripides

Do You Think that Advertising is Really Effective?

Our 21st century lives have been bombarded, blurred and overkilled with

advertising on TV, movies, radio, internet, magazines, newspapers, airplanes,

and even on the elevators up to our offices. The myriad of mixed advertising

messages that have infiltrated and controlled our down time has given most

consumers a huge headache and a diminished belief system. So, does traditional

advertising work today? Here are some serious stats that we just can't deny.

Consumer skepticism and a resistance to advertising are apparent in todays

marketplace. According to Insight Express, consumer trust in advertising has

plunged 41% over the past three years and only 10% of consumers say they trust

ads today.

In the varied world of todays media, the consumer is increasingly in

control. A recent study by Yankelovich, Inc. revealed that nearly 70% of consumers

were actively looking for ways to block, opt-out, or eliminate advertising.

Media fragmentation is out of control the average household today has over

100 television choices.

Given these facts, the pressure is on to improve targeting to your interested

market to achieve advertising relevance and to minimize your waste of

advertising that misses the mark. Therefore, todays successful marketers are

held to new levels of accountability and they have to prove the advertising is

working.

Do you agree that As More Power Shifts to Consumers the Need Grows For 'Renaissance Marketers'?

　

Together with a deeper understanding of Interactive Marketing

Communication.

Interactive marketing communications isn't new, but it's gaining momentum as

power shifts from the marketer to the consumer and as marketers recognize the

power and efficiency of taking a integrated approach to engaging consumers.

Several studies indicate that achieving effective Interactive Marketing

Communication campaigns is marketers' primary concern, one research study

indicated that, properly executed, interactive marketing is considerably more

effective allowing a Client to half his current advertising budget and be, at

least, 50% more effective.

"COST EFFECTIVENESS: Professor E.L. Roberto, PhD, Coca-Cola

Foundation Professor of International Marketing reviewed the £5 million of

independent research conducted on behalf of Interactive communication and

provided this summary as to the techniques cost efficiency:

"The Interactive "Event(s)" participating brands generated recall scores that

are more than 50% productive than normal advertising. The effect on purchase

intention is just as impressive if not much more.

All these productivity increments are attainable at a reasonably inexpensive

budget. One Client revealed that for its participating brand, its quarter

television expenditure was $5.7 million as compared to its interactive budget

of $0.5 million. This 1:10 ratio has been obtained in Interactive experience

in other countries."

However there is considerable uncertainty about how to staff, design, manage

and measure the success of such programs.

For too long, marketing functions have been vertically organized by media

type. This approach is mirrored on the agency side, with class 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 organization. This transformation must be led by holistic

professionals who are system thinkers, customer-centric believers, innovators

and dreamers.

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 analyze 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.

　

Discovering Interactive Television

　

　


This form of interactive communication dramatically alters the way the viewers perceive the commercials, instead of being seen as an interruption the commercials now become a meaningful source of information (a form of programming) and thus are watched in a totally different way.

Presenting advertising within this format allows the most dramatic evolution of advertising itself. This renaissance in this period of the ongoing history of advertising will be know as advertising by true, accurate, more predictable, instant and measurable results.

Clients will pay only by results. The interactive nature of the new technology will allow InteractiveTV to measure the results and present these results as a post-evaluation of their participation. Clients will then pay for participation based upon these evaluations.

　

Yes....or No?

Marketing…it's All a Question of Trust!

　

With the many billions spent annually on Marketing Communications, the TV programme

fakery together with the phone in scandals means that most of this colossal expenditure is

wasted because of a very serious issue, a declining lack of trust on behalf of your

customers!

And all the advertising in the world can't help you if you don't have trust.

The BBC and the commercial networks are not the only

organisations that have suffered a breakdown in trust recently.

Northern Rock, GMTV, Mattel, Bernard Matthews and Cadbury Schweppes have all,

recently, be weighed in the balance and found wanting. Levels of trust

in the West are in long-term decline, authority is something to be

challenged. So how have we come to this state? Perhaps it all started

as stores and communities grew larger and the personal bonds of trust and

loyalty that used to be enjoyed by the local trader who knew his customers wants

and needs, disappeared. In today's marketplace, time, attention and

trust seem to have become the scarcest resources and companies that fail to

recognise this fact are bound to suffer problems. As a result it is becoming

more and more important to ensure that there is a strong what's in it for me'

appeal to the consumer. With so many demands on their time they will

only spend quality time with those products and services that are clearly

offering them something of direct personal relevance and value.

Research published recently by Beyond Philosophy, a UK company specialising in

customer attitudes, claims 82 per cent of people never believe their experience

of an organisation will match the image promoted by television advertising.

Beyond Philosophy concludes that television advertising may actually be harming,

rather than enhancing, companies' relationships with their customers.

Similarly, research by the Henley Centre has shown that while nine out of ten

people will trust their spouse or partner and eight out of ten their children,

fewer than a third (27%) trust retailers or manufacturers, while just 14% trust

either the government or advertisers! Marketing appears to have

cottoned on to the fact that apparent intimacy enhances trustworthiness. There's no

denying that for business, being seen to be your trusted intimate pays.

There has been a loosening of emotional ties between business and society.

Indeed with the growth of new technology most transactions with consumers are

with faceless entities be it banking, our grocer or our car insurer.

In the past we did business with people you knew,

so trust was given in the interactions. In to day's world you have to

assume you can trust your bank it counts on a leap of faith that wasn't there

before. Only one form of communication can help overcome this lack of

trust that of interactive communication. Current conventional mass

media are weak conductors of knowledge and comprehension. This is because of a

number of factors, however the main reason is; they are non-interactive

communications vehicles, in other words conversations' cannot take place.

Interaction can be defined simply as straightforward

communication between two parties. Presently we are in danger of losing the real

meaning of interaction, as we tend to focus discussions on the emerging

technologies and neglect the communication process itself. With an understanding

of the real meaning of Interactive Communication, existing media can be made

interactive, and subsequently far more cost effective. Communication

research shows that interaction raises a communication's learning

effectiveness. Interactive communication, properly executed has none of

the woolly theorising that lies behind the arguments about various forms of

so-called interactive communication using direct

and electronic media (most of which involves at best the

minimum of true interactivity). It is also practical, down-to-earth,

and uses a readily comprehensible and verified mechanism to expand the relevance

and salience of advertising and other forms of marketing communications. It can

be applied to all major media and to various other forms of communication,

including new media. Trust absolutely sells, hence the urgent need to

understand and then implement interactive programmes. With interactive

communication you can go a long way to creating, and maintaining, a trusting

customer. Remember, trust is an end product, it is the consequence of other

things you cannot mandate it, you have to earn it and you earn it with a

rigorous understanding of, and then implementation, of interactive communication

I have been criticized by some as being a one-trick pony

- that I constantly espouse Interactive Marketing Communication and that's it. Plus I have been called "a Cassandra" and a "scold" Meanwhile, what I am trying to do is predict a far larger change in advertising and marketing entirely.

My forecasts are not meant to paint a rosy picture and that leads to many of you giving me less credibilty. For obvious reasons you would prefer to listen to a more bullish outlook. After all "nobody likes a bear, especially when they are right"!

The old ways of marketing and advertising are becoming increasingly ineffective and, even dangerous.

Conventional wisdom has become out-of-date and inaccurate! Despite all the recognition that my writing as acquired our basic message is still falling mostly on deaf ears, or, perhaps "denying minds". Most people do not want to wake up and fully face the truth of what is really happening. Marketing is evolving. We are not going back to how it was before. We are going forward to something new.

I understand how wishful thinking is so tempting. People hope that the bad dream is over and all is on the upswing. That outlook is not realistic in the long term.

The key to correctly judging` the future of marketing is to recognise that the future will be significantly different from the past. Rather than face decline or even the demise of advertising and marketing people still want to believe in the mythical "advertising works" to bring us back to what they had before!

　

Better Marketing Without Reform? - Forget It!




　

　

　

　

The current state of Marketing is such that the need for change and "New

Models" are desperately needed.

The trouble is the "New Models" will not prove to be financially sustainable

without substantially changing the way advertising and media services are

organised. The first thing we must do to start to tackle the problem is to

embrace our lack of knowledge about the process of communication. We must allow

outside organisations to question the fundamental ideas that shape current

advertising. We must allow them to innovate and keep the money saved through

innovation. That way there is a chance that advertising and marketing will keep

improving without costing more. One thing is for sure. We can't carry on as we

are. Pretending that without reform our money will go further. This is

definitely the time for creative innovation in Marketing, not the ridged belief

that Marketing and Advertising can still show us all the answers to our

problems - it never has and it never will.

Our only hope lies in a fundamental re-examination of the Marketing values we

have lived by in the past 30 years. Our future depends not on whether we get

through this, but how deeply and truthfully we examine its causes.

So just when are we going to prick our bubble of denial?

Because the Advertising and Marketing world is living in a world of denial.

They use rhetoric that blurs their perceptions and have become addicted to the

world view it represents.

At the same time reinforcing themselves by a stream of cheery models engaged

in consumption and leisure, they shuttle from workstation to mall, increasingly

insulated by a media consensus that leaves out the rest of the world. We have

had a band of denial built around ourselves, thus this belief cost us the

capacity to self-correct. Thus this delusional self-image is finally catching

up with us. And make no mistake marketing will benefit hugely when reality

breaks through.

Marketing can baffle the most intelligent people. That is most

understandable, for a start, making large marketing investments accountable is

a very inexact science. They rely, to an unnerving degree on assumptions that

may or may not be, accurate!

And Shout-as-Loud-as-you-can advertising is proven less effective every day,

Clients are looking for ways to get closer to their customers and prospects.

Brands want to deliver engaging, entertaining and educational messages in

environments they create, not in spaces they rent.

Without a doubt Marketing and Advertising management is dying under the

weight of its own contradictions! The old world of simplistic marketing

strategies no longer works. Certainly the easy certainties of the past are

over.

What is it, precisely, that we do so much better than any other country?

althought I must admit that all the trade magazines say at one time or another

that " American & British Advertising is the best in the world". Whatever

that means! This recession is not a failure of market economics. It is a

reassertion of market economics after a decade in which we paid ourselves more

than we were producing, and funded it precariously and temporarily, together

with a total lack of accountability so that it took a while for the market to

rumble. Now a prosperity that always baffled ordinary citizens has collapsed.

The collapse of confidence is not irrational; it's the correction to a long run

of irrational confidence. All that stuff about the emerging Asian giants wasn't

just phrasemaking for party conference speeches. It was true. We're falling

behind. We face a mountain of debt: the difference between the life we are able

to sustain and the life we were enjoying. Marketing people, having misled the

customers for so long must now explain a reduction in their standard of living.

The great task facing the next generation of Top-Down Management is to help the

country to recognise and embrace its fate: that we should get poorer, and slip

with as good a grace as possible into the world's second league. Yes, there is a

rebalancing required: a rebalancing of popular expectation.

We really need a more ethical advertising, and our whole concept of marketing practice needs to change

.

We must recognise that advertising has real responsibilities and that marketing is not just about

making money. Nobody yet appears to have hit upon a solution to improving marketing, and thus

advertising, yet it has to happen because they have both become a dangerous

monster, in need of harness. It has to be said that people don't seem to like

big business very much, we really don't like the power that companies have and

we certainly don't trust them to use them in our best interests! Advertising

is not about hope but expectations, marketing is not about dreams

but plans. The false prophets of modern marketing have warped more than the

language of consumerism. The future is unknowable, what can be known,

commentary suggests, is that social media and the Internet is replicating the

same errors old advertising and marketing committed. Somebody needs to make a

move, unilaterally determining that Social Media et al are not excellent

marketing vehicles merely more clutter!

Be brutally honest, do you have any idea how advertising works?

How advertising got itself into its present mess. No? Perhaps you console yourself

with the thought that it doesn't matter that you don't have a clue because there

are plenty of smart marketing people out there who do. Well, here's the tricky

part. Yes, those smart marketing people do indeed have a shrewd

idea on how to steer the world out of marketing chaos. The bad news is, they're not

all the same prescription. In fact they are different prescriptions. Very

different.

We snigger at fortune-tellers yet continue to take seriously the word of advertising

and marketing people, professions definable as people who have found a way to retain professorial

tenure even when their predictions turn out to be entirely wrong. Read the rival

pronouncements of the world's top advertising people and you soon find yourself

agreeing that their guess is as good as anybody else's. Because in Marketing

and advertising nobody knows anything! Even more disturbing, the arguments

about Social Media and how to fix advertising that we hear today are but a

queasy echo of those we heard years ago regarding the introduction of Commercial

TV...and didn't that work out well? Similar arguments about involvement, The

Internet, Social Media et al are today being regurgitated over the current

crisis. So what should we be doing? I really don't know except that we should

really study the meaning of the word communication a little more urgently. My

only excuse is that the people we rely on to know don't have a common style either.

　

Wake Up Marketing - Face the 21st Century


　

　

　

Your innovation-averse culture must go!

Marketing and advertising are on the slide. When will these once great

businesses confront reality and fight back? Because at the moment both

Advertising and Marketing have become innovation-averse cultures! Both

professions are risk-averse, innovation-averse and antipathetic to new

ideas.

Worse than that they are totally lacking in accountability because those

given responsibility do not have the requisite authority and knowledge to

discharge it.

So what's behind the decline and fall? Most certainly a sclerotic marketing

system that doesn't have the power to re-examine the need for massive

re-evaluation of the process of advertising and marketing. It's antiquated,

early 19th Century concepts do not work, (if they ever did!) they still do not

have any true accountability.

It may be that the future scholar identifies Advertising's sclerotic, twisted

concepts of communication as the biggest business weakness of all.Simply put.

An early 19th century concept cobbled together by a small number of

opportunistic men cannot properly function for the Western world at the

beginning of the 21st century. The current system of Advertising &

Marketing is an anachronism.

Among business people cynicism about advertising ability to deliver grow, now

with the advent of the Internet, this can only increase this cynicism.

The twin challenges to advertisings' 60-year old hegemony are enormous. The

first is a total misunderstanding of the word "communication" and a misplaced

belief that "creativity" is the sole criteria for the success or otherwise of

advertisings ability to sell products and services. Secondly there is a broad

global trend towards the internet together with the frightening inability of

advertising to be totally accountable, in the case of the latter just how long

can this stupidity last? Just when does Marketing dare to balance the

budget?

It could well be that the future business scholar will identify marketings

sclerotic, twisted business decision-making system as the biggest weakness of

all. Put simply an early 19th century business concept cobbled together by a

small number of business men cannot properly function for the West as the

number one business method for the 21st century. To-day it can be said that

Advertising and Marketing are an anachronism which is why so many articles

abound as to the way advertising is going. Nowadays some senior executives call

trust the scarcest resource of all and marketing enhances such an attitude!

It has been said that Marketers are stuck in a world between the old rules

and the new rules. To deal with the new rules of changing media, technology and

consumer behaviour, many marketers delegate emerging marketing solutions to a

handful of external partners or internal 'experts'. In doing so, they have

enabled the rest of the organisation to behave much like it did ten years ago,

clinging to the old rules!

　

　

　

Game Playing and Marketing Games Offer you a Unique Way to Entertain...




-- and sell at the same time!

Whilst experimenting with social networks, user-generated content and on line video,

marketers appear content to view games as little more than another

class advertising platform. The untapped potential of game

playing lies in their ability to tell stories, thereby more closely linking

brand benefits with game play and blurring the lines between brand and

entertainment. Games, properly structured, fundamentally alter the customers

perception to the presentation and content of your marketing messages thus

making the advertisements themselves a

source of meaningful information. Games allow Brands to become

engaging, and entertaining -- thereby providing something of value in exchange for attention.

Brands such as Persil, Birds Eye and Quaker Oats have relied on game playing to create

narratives that consumers want to be a part of. In the process, they've done

more than just break through the clutter, or better position themselves in

consumer's minds. Games remain one of the biggest untapped

opportunities for marketers, for the simple fact that they are, indeed, engaging

interactive and entertaining. Well-conceived games require users' active

attention and enable them to drive the story line as they experience a world

that can be entirely of a brand's making. Games represent a unique opportunity

for brands to be the entertainment rather than just sponsor it.

So what do original games get you? If you're Quaker Oats,

you get year-over-year double-digit sales growth, as well as a

marketing program that has generated significant

revenue. So what does this mean for marketers? It

demonstrates that there's a burgeoning mainstream audience increasingly

receptive to branded entertainment in the form of original episodic games and

willing to grant brands their attention in exchange for enjoyable

experiences. Games need to be implemented strategically.

As with any marketing approach, objectives and performance expectations for

game-based marketing need to be considered upfront. Here are some things to keep

in mind: A game tends to work best as a component of an integrated campaign

rather than an afterthought. Original episodic games can

counteract this imbalance by delivering a high level of play and replay value to

consumers while putting the brand at the center of the experience.

So does a brand need to be interesting or provocative in order to make a

good game? Absolutely not. All our examples show that basic games deployed and

used well were effective at making a low-involvement category more interesting

and engaging. And implemented properly, games could address many of the

challenges facing financial-services companies -- building involvement,

generating a prospect , creating a sense of community, even delivering a positive brand halo.

ACCOUNTABILITY

　

　

Professor E.L. Roberto, PhD, Coca-Cola, foundation professor of International Marketing, reviewed the £A15 million of independent research conducted on behalf of Shopper’s Voice and provided this summary as to the technique’s cost efficiency:

"The Shopper’s Voice participating advertisements generated recall scores that are more than 50% productive than normal advertising. The effect on purchase intention is just as impressive if not much more.

All these productivity increments are attainable at a reasonably inexpensive budget. One Shopper’s Voice Client revealed that for his participating brand, his quarter television expenditure was $US5.7 million as compared to its Shopper’s Voice budget of $US0.5 million. This 1:10 ratio has been obtained in Shopper’s Voice experience in other countries."

Sources: AGB, Gallup, Martyn Research, Bourke, NOP, City Insights & more.

The desperate need to restructure advertising and marketing

Only interactive marketing communication will provide clients with the

necessary communicaion and feedback necessary for effective marketing to take place.

For too long, marketing functions have been vertically organised by media

type. This approach is mirrored on the agency side, with rewards based on

discipline-specific 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.

　

　

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 or

online. 1) Consumers do not trust advertising,2) Consumers do not want to

view advertising and most important 3) Consumers do not need advertising!

Barriers to Great Advertising

Advertising testing could provide a reliable feedback loop and lead to much better advertising, but many obstacles stand in the way. The first great barrier to better advertising is self-delusion. Most of us believe, in our heart-of-hearts, that we know what good advertising is and that there is no need for any kind of independent, objective evaluation. Agencies and clients alike often think that they know how to create and judge good advertising. Besides, once agencies and clients start to fall in love with the new creative, they quickly lose interest in any objective evaluation. No need for advertising testing. Case closed.

Strangely, after 40 years of testing advertising, we cannot tell you if a commercial is any good or not, just by viewing it. Sure, we have opinions, but they are almost always wrong. In our experience, advertising agencies and their clients are just as inept at judging advertising as we are. It seems that none of us is smart enough to see advertising through the eyes of the target audience, based purely on our own judgment.

A second barrier to better advertising is the belief that sales performance will tell if the advertising is working. Unless the sales response to the advertising is immediate and overwhelming, it is almost impossible to use sales data to judge the effectiveness of the advertising. So many variables are beyond our control, as noted, that it’s impossible to isolate the effects of media advertising alone. Moreover, some advertising works in a few weeks, while other advertising might take many months to show positive effects, and this delayed response can confound our efforts to read the sales data. Also, advertising often has short-term effects that sales data might reflect, and long-term (years later) effects that most of us might easily overlook in subsequent sales data. Because of these limitations, sales data tends to be confusing and unreliable as an indicator of advertising effectiveness.

　

　

Interactive Communication, properly executed,

provides a win-win-win scenario for all participating parties.

For the first time in the history of commercial communication, participating parties can

expect to benefit from appearing in interactive communications

"Events".

For communication to be successful mutual self- interest has to

be satisfied. Consumers need Interactive Communication. People desire to be taken account of, to

affect change, learn and personalise their relationships with their environment. There are a

phenomenal number of reasons which cause people to interact, which go far

beyond just giving them things. When people participate in interactive

marketing communication "Events" they are told that their efforts and feedback

are of positive help to the advertisers. Moreover, by participating, they then

learn and understand the message from the advertiser, personalise their

relationship with the advertiser and their products (or services). The

benefits for participating advertisers? For the first time advertising

becomes totally accountable with payment by results only.

Interactive communication provides intelligent sales through feedback and involvement. Thus

allowing the building of intelligent databanks. Thus the interactive

Medium becomes accountable and more effective. By the very nature of

interactive "Events" the audience are captivated by the technique.

Interaction alters the way viewers/readers perceive advertising, instead of being viewed as

interruption your advertising becomes a pleasurable and meaningful source of

information. There is a substantial increase in the reading/viewing figures and

it readily counters zapping.

Marketing can baffle the most intelligent people,

which is most understandable, for a start, making large marketing investments accountable is a

very inexact science. They rely, to a unnerving degree on assumptions that may

or may not be accurate.

Trust, or the absence of it, deepens marketing's lack of ability to reassure

customers that what they are saying is honest and accurate. Marketing success

and wealth creation is not given to corporations as of right. It must be

earned!

Those marketing people whose decisions have led to the economic collapse

reveal to us how profoundly lacking in vision they were. These were never

people of vision. They make decisions in the marketing sphere. But just how do

these decisions relate to the wider world was never part of their make-up.

This is a great flaw and one for which we are paying the price for now.

Commerce is a natural part of human life but is has become increasingly

unnatural over the intervening centuries, gradually divorcing itself from the

very people on whom it depends, whether workers or customers. The result has

been to create a huge chasm between buyers and sellers.

Advertising's failure!


Conventional advertising has failed the natural human need for social

interaction. We have created a media society during the last 30 or 40 years

where there is an extraordinary reduction in interaction because of the one-way

and more passive form of information that exists. We need to restore interactive communication

between your customers and your product, and reduce your huge marketing busgets.

Go for an arresting Claim

Remember the Wizard of Oz? When the great curtains of the Emerald City

were finally pulled back, Dorothy and her friends found...nothing. Just a small

anxious figure who had until then been able to project a big confident illusion.

Well, advertising people have been hiding a dreadful secret, they have nothing

to hide, nothing to propose, and, worse still, nothing to support their

bombastic illusions! Listen to an ad man speak and you would not gain the

impression of a master strategist, towering intellect, communications colossus

and business titan whom we underestimate at our peril. Advertising

agencies have, for years, been past masters of making an arresting claim

whenever they are hazy about facts or logic, which happens to be most of the

time! The world, the media and our own country have for too long indulged

advertising by never responding to their abstractions that advertising works and

that has suited advertising beautifully. Now as more and more evidence of the

failure of advertising emerges one is forced to admit that advertising is a

total business disaster and has been so for many a year!

There is a niggling, small-scale dishonesty in the way they use words facts and

figures. There is, in advertising people, a paralyzing failure of intellectual

confidence together with a yawning absence of true creativity. Take for

example the intellectual nonsense of accountant turned ad man, Sir Martin

Sorrell. He recently said London and New York are

no longer the creative centers of the world. Absolute stuff and nonsense, if

he, accountant turned ad man Sorrell knew anything about the process of

communication he would appreciate the fact that creativity is no longer, if it

ever has been, the sole criterion for the success or otherwise of an advertising

campaign!He goes on to talk about the most financially efficient advertising

again, complete stuff and nonsense there is no such thing as accountability in

advertising so nobody knows a dam thing about financially efficient

advertising. See what I mean about niggling small-scale dishonesty in the

way they use words?

People Respect Bankers And Politicians More Than Marketers !



According to a study by Adobe and Edelman Berland, people think

both politicians and bankers are more respectable than marketers. Only 13 percent of

consumers think that marketing benefits society. In fact, only 35 percent of respondents who

work in marketing think that their profession is valuable.

But when asked if marketing benefits society, only 13% of consumers agreed.

And compared to other professions, the results were grim. Teachers -- despite

how little they are often compensated -- were valued at the top of the list,

followed by scientists and engineers. That's somewhat to be expected. But what

was more surprising was that advertising and marketing ranked below nearly every

other profession, including bankers (32%), lawyers (34%) and even politicians

(18%). Marketing and advertising was tied with the job of an actor or actress in

terms of its value.

There was only one profession that ranked lower in the survey, and even that

one is just a part of the marketing ecosystem: PR professionals. Only 11% said

PR is a valuable job. Meanwhile, the results weren't much better among

marketers; only 35% of people who were marketers themselves deemed it a valuable

profession in responding to the survey!