Not Such a New Era
Chris Baggott, on his email blog, recently predicted the end of mass marketing.
While I like Chris's blog a lot, I don't agree with him on this one. Yes, the traditional approaches of advertising to mass audiences through mass media are changing dramatically, as the mass media splinter into all kinds of new things. But, for a couple of reasons, I think this is much less dramatic of a change than he does.
First of all, there's a human tendency to want to be tuned in to what other people are tuned into. That may not mean you all saw the same ad during the same TV show, but it may just mean you saw the same ads on 100 different cable channels, or posted over 100 different urinals, or on 100 different buses.
Second, marketers have failed to take advantage of most of the potential of one to one marketing. It's a great idea that turned out to be pretty hard to implement, so mostly you see the vehicles that were supposed to deliver personalized marketing (email being the main one) used to deliver the same messages to poorly targeted audiences.
Finally, there's a social cost to it all. When I read the comment on getting "all the news I care about" delivered via a web portal, I thought of the the role alternative news delivery plays in the fragmentation (political and social) of the country. Now that we can all choose specific news sources, we can shut out information we don't like. So we still have vast numbers of people in the US who think Iraq has something to do with 9/11, or that we give a lot of money out in foreign aid, and so on.
A while back someone asked me, "Hey, have you seen that commercial with..." The answer was, no. I haven't seen any commercials in several years - ever since the day I got my Tivo. Strangely enough, that made me a little sad. I felt like I was missing something.
Mass marketing will continue because the mass audience still exists, even if it's not paying attention to the same things. That sounds contradictory, but it's true; there's a mass culture of personalization of our media consumption, but there's still a strong desire to find out about the hot new thing everybody else has heard of. Consumers are people, and people are nothing if not contradictory.
While I like Chris's blog a lot, I don't agree with him on this one. Yes, the traditional approaches of advertising to mass audiences through mass media are changing dramatically, as the mass media splinter into all kinds of new things. But, for a couple of reasons, I think this is much less dramatic of a change than he does.
First of all, there's a human tendency to want to be tuned in to what other people are tuned into. That may not mean you all saw the same ad during the same TV show, but it may just mean you saw the same ads on 100 different cable channels, or posted over 100 different urinals, or on 100 different buses.
Second, marketers have failed to take advantage of most of the potential of one to one marketing. It's a great idea that turned out to be pretty hard to implement, so mostly you see the vehicles that were supposed to deliver personalized marketing (email being the main one) used to deliver the same messages to poorly targeted audiences.
Finally, there's a social cost to it all. When I read the comment on getting "all the news I care about" delivered via a web portal, I thought of the the role alternative news delivery plays in the fragmentation (political and social) of the country. Now that we can all choose specific news sources, we can shut out information we don't like. So we still have vast numbers of people in the US who think Iraq has something to do with 9/11, or that we give a lot of money out in foreign aid, and so on.
A while back someone asked me, "Hey, have you seen that commercial with..." The answer was, no. I haven't seen any commercials in several years - ever since the day I got my Tivo. Strangely enough, that made me a little sad. I felt like I was missing something.
Mass marketing will continue because the mass audience still exists, even if it's not paying attention to the same things. That sounds contradictory, but it's true; there's a mass culture of personalization of our media consumption, but there's still a strong desire to find out about the hot new thing everybody else has heard of. Consumers are people, and people are nothing if not contradictory.
posted by John Whiteside at 10/10/2005 09:41:00 PM
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