brilliance from blabber? marketing and the internet part one

Last night, and again this morning, I read a piece in the April 14th edition of Advertising Age entitled "Separating Brilliance from Blabber", which I can only assume is an ironic title, given the paltry substance of the piece.

Advertising Age occasionally publishes useful articles. But in the main, I've found Advertising Age to be a lot of trumpeting, without much of a backing band; they're invariably happy to load their pages with a lot of voices saying "You should be doing this, and oh, probably this too... and goddamn, you better do this, or else...!", while generally skimping out on the how and usually the why while they're at it.

In this particular case, "Separating Brilliance from Blabber" represented a roundtable discussion with a baker's dozen of "influential marketing bloggers" culled from AdAge's Power 150. The goal here was to "make sense of the increasingly lawless, shifting relationships among consumers, companies and media". Like any self-respecting roundtable discussion, nothing appears to have been accomplished. As usual, many different questions from all sides of the issue were asked and never answered. As usual, trying to cram thirteen (fourteen, counting the moderator) peoples' opinions into one page was pretty pointless. And as usual the conversation swirled around, with the internet at the center of debate.

It's no secret that marketers and the companies they work for don't get the internet. For fifteen years it's been the same story; corporations trying to monetize the net, marketers using the internet as just another selling medium, treating it as another form of television. Fifteen years on, and marketers still treat the internet as a one-way medium, thereby missing the entire point of the net. Fifteen years on, and marketers are still entrenched in the mindset that produced corporate brochureware websites.

Why?

Because when it comes to the internet, the laws of marketing break down, just as the laws of physics break down at the point of a singularity.

There is a fundamental disconnect in the way in which a corporation (and by extension marketers) approach the internet. Until the advent of the net, marketing was designed to operate in a single direction - from corporation to consumer. Everything that marketing is hinges on this simple rule. Direct mail. Telemarketing. Magazine ads. Billboards. TV and radio commercials. Point of sale. Marketing is a one-way street, with corporations barreling down on the consumer in Mack trucks.

The convergence of technology and the internet, however, has enabled the consumer in ways completely foreign to the laws of marketing. Thanks to the internet, telemarketing has been all but stopped in its tracks. That technology, coupled with caller IDs and call blocking, allowed consumers to stand up and say "No more of this!", with resounding impact. The same kind of legislation is now in the works for direct mail as well, and spam filters already keep out a lot of messages without any real legislation; even so, the anti-spam war continues. TiVo and other DVR technology may not have overtaken typical television viewing as predicted, but the impact is there nonetheless. Consumers who care, or bother to do it, are able to tune out to commercials. And that sort of behavior is spreading.

Every day there's talk of the empowerment of consumers. What gets left out of the discussion, though, is that this empowerment is an ongoing process. Consumers have not "become empowered". They're still learning, still feeling their way through the maze of this empowerment. Behavior has changed already, but it is still changing. And the internet is both a tool of that change and a reflection of that change.

As the internet evolves, so too does behavior. The personal home page evolved into blogs, evolved into social networking sites and profiles. Email lists evolved into messageboards, and evolved into social networking sites as well. File-sharing evolved from hidden warez sites to Peer-to-Peer to torrents. With each evolution, online behavior evolved as well. What people came online to do changed. The way people interact with the internet changed. Each evolution enabled users to do more, to interact more, to become more engaged with the medium. Users learned. And more importantly, with ease-of-access, more users became involved. More and more, consumers no longer sit back and consume. They become producers instead, no longer willing to merely observe.

Corporate marketing, meanwhile, evolved from brochureware websites and banner ads to... well, slightly less brochureware websites, and banner ads and text ads.

All of which is kind of a roundabout way of saying "oh crap".