schneiderism

This is going to be a bit stream-of-consciousness, but I want to share these thoughts. I feel like I am experiencing a slow motion revolution of sorts, one that has been underway for a while, as I’ve suddenly experienced a lot of discussion around broken models, agencies of the future, emerging media, and the new marketing… primarily from the kickass blogs (all now featured in my blogroll on the right, so visit them often) of Tim Brunelle, Todd Defren, Garrick Van Buren, and Matt Dickman. Garrick and I have actually had some killer conversations IN PERSON, as well. Anyway, this discussion has really been happening for years (in slow motion…), but lately it seems more intense, more focused. I think some people are scared, and others are excited. Why? These two camps, scared and excited, pretty much align perfectly to those that don’t get what is happening in the world of media, advertising, communications, and people’s expectations for same, and those that do get what is happening. I am beginning to hear with more frequency references to “New Marketing,” “New Advertising,” and “New PR” from those that appear to get this reality. What makes them new?

Well, pretty simply, three things… and how they are successfully dealing with them:

1. The increasing prevalence of the internet in a pervasive, accessible way, and…
2. The reality that the internet is rapidly becoming everyone’s medium of choice.
3. That traditional advertising, PR & marketing is largely irrelevant given 1 & 2.

I’m certainly not the first to point this out, but it would seem prescient to remind ourselves (especially those of you that are scared) that things are now very, very different than they were even five years ago. People ignore advertising and messages. They find them irritating, and are annoyed when these things are pushed at them. But even in the context of social media, old models persist. At lunch today Aaron Keller of Capsule pointed out that the ads on his MySpace page really bothered him because he didn’t care. They were for companies that he’s not at all interested in. They took up space and were irrelevant and distracting in a bad way. That is the old model in action. Let’s look more closely at how that happened:

1. Company with an internal marketing team wants to get a message out.
2. That message is that they are “current, with it, and meaningful to the kids.”
3. They engage an agency of sorts.
4. Agency brainstorms and comes up with banner ads. Ugh.
5. Agency says “You should be advertising on MySpace, where the kids are.”
6. A big media buy and campaign investment later, it’s lunch conversation for us.

And so it goes. The advent of the internet changed a lot of things, but one thing it really did well was create a communications platform that empowered a lot of people to start talking about their likes and dislikes and about their experiences. It began to connect people in new and meaningful ways based on this talking. Suddenly, what was being said mattered. It came from real people, and felt much more authentic. In most cases it WAS/IS authentic. Suddenly, you could niche down as far as your interests demand and suddenly, advertising, marketing and PR in the traditional sense seemed somewhat less relevant, and sometimes totally irrelevant. Not good for traditionalists in these industries. The internet has allowed us to refine the skill of ignoring everything except that which we are interested in. Going back to those that get it, it would seem the smartest thing to do in these industries is work really hard on connecting people with the information, products, services and companies they are interested in. To help them connect, to support them, to make it easy. For the agency to be the advocate for the audience, which probably sounds totally heretical to some. This is a partnership with audience that is pretty cool, and yet to be really figured out. It won’t be advertising, marketing, or PR when it is figured out… it’ll be something “New.”