Imagine
There’s No Marketing …“It’s Easy If You Try”
Traditional marketing has been taking it on the
chin for a couple of years now as consumers show they value
as far more authentic the product and service recommendations they
receive from those they know, especially via social media. In this opinion
piece, Curtis Hougland, co-founder of Ideaology, a not-for-profit social media
agency for social good, notes that the rise of ad blockers is symbolic of the
tectonic shift in advertising and marketing now underway.
The redistribution of
power from brands to individuals is the enduring legacy of social media. The
recent rise of ad blocking represents a tectonic shift in the balance of power
between marketers and consumers. This technology represents more than just a
functional way to block digital ads: it represents the very end of marketing as
we have known it.
Marketing is culture, and
culture is marketing in America. The mass adoption of television, radio and the
Internet required everyone to have a co-dependent relationship with marketing,
which became ubiquitous, even celebrated.
In days gone by, ads
interspersed the pages of LIFE Magazine, punctuated scenes of All
in the Familyand framed the webpages of Compuserve.com. Last month, they
infiltrated the feeds of Instagram. Today, gas station pumps, elevator cars and
dentist lobbies beam ambient marketing messages. The march toward omnipresent
marketing appears inexorable.
Yet marketing stands at
an existential crossroads.
For the first time we can
read its epitaph: “Killed by Consumption, Eaten by Cannibals.” Marketing is
slowly being ingested and eliminated by the very consumers it ‘targets’ every
day.
The
form and formats of marketing are expiring amid a failure to compete for
attention with media, influencers, friends and family. One might say that the
seeds of marketing’s demise reside within the 50 billion messages sent by
individuals each day on What’s App alone.
The culprit behind this
“dysadvertopian” future is, of course, technology.
*****
The computer revolution
of the early 1980s, the Web revolution of the early ’90s and the social media
revolution of the early 2000s constitute one irresistible trend realized in
three temporal lurches: a greater individual/consumer control of experiences,
both personal and commercial.
Technology catalyzed five
trends that portend the death of traditional marketing:
more media and
information;
greater access to this
media and information;
self-organization of this
media and information by narrower and narrower affinities;
control of the means to
create and distribute this media and information;
tools to parse this media
and information (and in so doing, our attention) in both public and private
communication.
Within technology
overall, social media is the fox in the hen house for the acceleration of
change.
Social media is far more
than a set of networks. It is a behavior, one in which people act on a
biological imperative to share and socialize; an organizing principle by which
people self-organize by increasingly diverse affinities; and an operating
system by which middlemen (such as marketers) are universally disintermediated.
This social behavior is
the dark matter that connects all communication, word-of-mouth spelled in 1s
and 0s through billions of texts and posts each day. Social media reflects
humanity, and as such, it is contradictory: it simultaneously reaffirms what
people already believe, while exposing them also to more diverse opinions. It
is the friction between more media and fixed time.
So with apologies to John
Lennon, I ask you to … Imagine.
“Imagine All the People”
Consumers are simply
outcompeting marketers for each other’s attention. Seventy percent of consumers
trust brand recommendations from friends, but only 10% trust advertising, according to Forrester Research.
Everyone understands the
power of word-of-mouth to drive purchase decisions. People simply don’t like or
trust marketing, an impossible long-term commercial position in the private
sector.
The personal brand of the
individual sharer commands significantly greater influence than the published
brand today.
Given
this redistribution of power, brand content is relatively impotent. Corporate
brands mean increasingly less as personal brands have come to mean more. Dove
Beauty is brilliant marketing, but the campaign pales next to the authenticity
of media from Michelle Phan, the self-described “vibe master” and
make-up maven.
Set against such trends
as these, “marketing” — a term of art — will become an anachronism that follows
“new media” (and soon, “social media”) into linguistic extinction.
“Living for Today”
That consumers bypass
marketing with greater ease is irrefutable. In fact, consumers swat away
marketing with disdainful regularity.
According
to a recent Reuters study, 47% of internet users in the U.S. already
use ad blocking technology, and the percentage is higher among younger users.
Marketing is increasingly ephemeral against the backdrop of busier, more
impatient lives.
Netflix customers evade
television ads. Spotify customers access 4,000,000 songs ad-free.
FiOS customers watch new
releases from their giant home theaters robbing theaters of overpriced popcorn
sales and in-theater advertising. Forums such as Reddit are downright hostile
to advertising, and 160 million consumers visit its dark recesses for respite
from marketers. Instagram’s massive success has stemmed, in part, from its lack
of advertising, which only introduced clickable ads in March.
The most frequent form of
communication in the entire world is text, which marketers have not effectively
penetrated at the same scale.
With each encroachment of
marketing into social feeds, consumers move to darker (more private) channels
with different permissions and languages. It is a cat and mouse game in which
the winner is bound to be the individual. Features such as Facebook’s auto-play
violate the basic tenet of consumerism today: The user is in control, and his attention
is his own.
“Above Us Only Sky”
Consumers no longer need
to seek marketing and media. Marketing and media come to them.
Everything arrives and
then commingles in feeds and streams, where the flora (media) and fauna
(people) of social media reside.
Despite being organized
chronologically, the feed is fundamentally non-linear and unpredictable.
The success of marketing
depends on reaching people when they are emotionally engaged.
Despite the promise of
social advertising and programmatic media buying, these emotional moments are
largely unknowable to either marketers or even to individuals themselves.
Creative cannot keep up with data, because marketers create advertising rather
than narratives.
The right message at the
right time on the right channel is a chimera. Human actions and human
self-knowledge simply don’t align sufficiently to reach the goal of marketers.
What humans want and what they do are simply not (always) the same.
Ad-tech is ultimately a
tool of users to filter out marketing, which cannot truly understand the
complexities of consumer intent, which is by its very nature mercurial.
“I Hope One Day You’ll Join Us”
Every emerging
marketplace matures quickly today. Brands are proliferating at an exponential
rate, because social media drives everything toward narrower affinities and
presents more open access to choice. PepsiCo, for instance, markets more than
25 brands of Mountain Dew alone.
In addition, the Internet
and social media have proved wildly efficient at disseminating information.
Ideas surface quickly with few barriers to entry and facile access to capital.
Choice is only ever a click or a gesture away. Consideration is won and lost in
the exchange of a link in a text between friends. Loyalty, one of the primary
attributes of a brand, fades in the face of this digital proximity to other
choices.
Marketers are quickly
eating all the whitespace in the current technological and visual paradigms.
Consumers cannot handle
all of this choice, but they do not have to, because technology is empowering
them to filter marketing out of their existence.
*****
Ironically, this death of
marketing at the hands of its customers is great for business. Each of these
trends maps to a point in the future in which marketing loses mindshare.
This future arrives in
four easy installments:
There is only one
channel: you. Your feed is your persona, your intent, your avatar. Personal and
professional, commercial and social, all blend in the feed.
The individual accesses
these experiences visually like the paragon of a Visual RSS Reader. This feed
understands what the individual wants, because the individual instructs it, and
the feed learns to differentiate between intent and marketing. It maps intent
to location, affinity and authenticity. And as ad-tech becomes a tool of the
user, not the advertiser, the feed turns endless choice into actionable choice
based on the individual’s intent.
“Imagine All the People” (All Online)
As consumers outcompete
marketers for each other’s attention, every piece of media
contained in the feed is not only shareable, but shoppable.
The functionality resides
within the media itself to buy all of the products and services featured in the
video, photo or post. The consumer bypasses the unwanted border fences of
YouTube hotspots and Zappo’s site with ease. E-commerce loses the requirement
to uproot the buyer from their media and direct them to a sterile form in an
altogether different digital location to purchase.
Every feed in social
media represents a mega Walmart, or rather 7,000,000,000 superstores, designed
by the individual himself or herself. E-commerce is recast as
“everywhere-commerce.”
“Above Us Only Sky” (not
Networks)
As the individual
controls the marketing experience, communication shifts from public
to semi-private.
In the social media 1.0
world of Twitter and Facebook 2015, the excitement of being able to share with
everyone resulted in an initial urge to, well, share with everyone. This
openness acted as an invitation, or permission, for marketing to participate in
everyone’s social experiences.
As the feed orients the
social experience around the individual, and less around the network’s rules,
experiences can become more personal, and as a result, more immersive. The fear
of missing out leads to a joy of missing out, because the individual, you, are
now in control, not the network.
This is the legacy of
Snapchat, in which consumers find darker, more private places to elude the
weird uncle that is marketing. Ephemerality of content actually increases its
value today. Teens continue to create their own vernacular. It is tete-a-tete
between consumers and brands, in which the more the brands infiltrate social
experiences, the more the individual seeks darker, more personal channels.
The era of social media
(public) gives way to the era of experiential media (semi-private).
“I Hope One Day You’ll Join Us” (in a
Marketing Free Future)
As marketing matures
toward extinction amid a maturing consumer landscape, two types of
marketing survive like cockroaches after the apocalypse.
First, discounts and
sales persist: Buy 1, Get 1!, Free, Must Go Now!, 40% off!
Any direct marketer can
relate how “free” trumps other messages.
Second, sponsorships such
as “Maxwell House Presents The Cavalcade of Starts,” in which the relationship
between marketer and media is transparent, and the individual receives genuine
value in return also persist. The digital Gazprom signs witnessed on television
around the Women’s World Cup arena in Vancouver are here to stay.
Content marketing evolves
into an exercise in commissioning rather than creating. Influencer marketing
reigns, because it represents the midpoint between crappy brand content and
user-generated media. Brands have largely failed at content marketing, and cannot
compete with technology or creators in this future.
*****
“You May Say I’m A
Dreamer, But I am not the Only One.”
Of course, this article
is not solely about the future. It strives to outline an emerging marketing
cosmology about how marketers should behave today; the ways in which we can
future-proof ourselves against these trends; and how we adapt in the short term
to greater consumer control and more deeply immersive media. Too many marketing
departments are operating business as usual when they should be fighting for
survival.
The Internet of the
future and the Internet of the past do not destroy markets outright. Death
often arrives by a thousand (or in this case a billion) cuts. It is difficult
for marketers to see the endgame, because the competition from consumers is
fragmented into so many small acts.
Marketers’ false sense of
confidence is logical in a way. The industry benefits from better data, a
larger creative palette and more discerning customers. Today’s golden age seems
incongruous with a gradual decline. So, marketers respond to their decreasing
share of attention with what they know — even more marketing. But as supply
grows, demand ultimately shrinks.
Ultimately, any path
forward for marketers is based on capitulation to, not competition with, the
consumers.
Marketing is at an
inflection point in a battle it cannot win without joining the other side.
Marketing itself is a
product no one likes or trusts, but which consumers could not avoid. Consumer
control is a tectonic shift, not a trend. This balance of power has shifted,
irrevocably. Technology and individuals represent an unbeatable team.
So … imagine there’s no
marketing.
It is easy if you try.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/imagine-theres-no-marketing-its-easy-if-you-try/?utm_source=kw_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2015-11-13
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